Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 9 January

The Castle (Sitch, 1997)

For TVNZ in Aotearoa, the best Christmas present of all would’ve been the news that both Prime Video (aka Amazon) and Neon (aka Sky) were intro­du­cing ads on their stream­ing ser­vices in 2024.

With large num­bers of Netflix sub­scribers drop­ping to an ad-supported sub­scrip­tion tier, the big dis­ad­vant­age that TVNZ had in com­par­is­on with those big-time play­ers disappears.

So now – des­pite my own aver­sion to advert­ising – I should prob­ably stop treat­ing the ad-supported stream­ers as second best and start fea­tur­ing them more heav­ily in these updates.

Especially as TVNZ has a ter­rif­ic slate of clas­sic films avail­able, with new titles arriv­ing regularly.

This is exem­pli­fied by the recent addi­tion of one of the greatest films of all time: Rob Sitch’s The Castle. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil things by going into too much detail here but if you have seen it, I’m sure you’ll con­firm that it’s prob­ably the most quot­able film of all time.

The premise is that a work­ing class fam­ily decides to fight back against the forced acquis­i­tion of their sub­urb­an home for a new run­way at Melbourne Airport. It’s a clas­sic David and Goliath story, per­fect for the Australian vernacular.

Back in 1997, I was work­ing at the Paramount pic­ture theatre in Wellington and we had an extremely busy Friday night pre­view screen­ing of The Castle. Outside, I heard one pat­ron com­plain that the film “talked down” to its char­ac­ters and, to this day, I still believe that the com­ment says more about that per­son than it does about a film that pat­ently loves every single one them.

Where to find The Castle

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming with ads on TVNZ+, digit­al rent­al from AroVision

Australia: Streaming on Stan

USA: Digital rent­al from Apple

UK: Currently unavailable