Eagle vs Shark (Waititi, 2007) is streaming on Netflix
Last night, hunting around Netflix for buried treasure I saw that Taika Waititi’s 2007 debut feature Eagle vs Shark had appeared. Coincidentally, I saw that my review of the original theatrical release was published this very week 16 years ago:
Eagle vs Shark carries a great burden of expectation: Taika Waititi’s Oscar nomination, invitations to Sundance, international Miramax support, pointless comparisons with Napoleon Dynamite. A film with less heart than this one could easily collapse under all that weight but this Eagle soars.
Loren Horsley is Lily, a hopeless romantic with her heart set on Jarrod (Jemaine Clement) from the video game shop a few doors down. Unfortunately, Jarrod’s a dick but she sees something in him and, over the course of a lovely and sad little film, teases it out despite all good sense telling her to run a mile. EVS is full of great (mostly small) comic moments and observations and on the rare occasions when something doesn’t quite work it’s easy to ride with it. A wonderful, unusual, soundtrack from The Phoenix Foundation, too.
The career trajectories for Waititi and Clement since then are well-known although sadly not quite as spectacular for co-writer Loren Taylor (Horsley as was).
If you were around Wellington in the early 2000s many of the supporting faces will be eerily familiar. It’s almost as much of a time machine for me as Gaylene Preston’s newly-restored Bread & Roses from 1993 (which screened at the recent Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival) in which so many of my theatre contemporaries looked simply spectacular. So young, so beautiful.
That 2007 review at the F&S archive also contains Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes (unavailable online at the moment), Live Free or Die Hard (aka Die Hard 4.0) featuring Cliff Curtis in a supporting role, Michael Moore’s documentary about the US health system, Sicko, and the much-maligned Adam Sandler vehicle I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.
