Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 18 February

The Road to Patagonia (Hannon, 2024)

One of the tools of the read­er here at Funerals & Snakes is the web­site JustWatch which is a com­pre­hens­ive* sur­vey of what’s cur­rently stream­ing on which plat­form in whatever coun­try or ter­rit­ory you choose.

As a pro user of the ser­vice, I get quarterly media releases show­ing which stream­ing ser­vices have the most users. The stats are based on the num­ber of users who have selec­ted a plat­form as one to mon­it­or, or who have marked a film or show as ‘watched’ on a platform.

The res­ults for the quarter to the end of December 2024 are fas­cin­at­ing (and in some cases surprising).

Netflix remains num­ber one but the first sur­prise is that Prime Video (Amazon) is num­ber two. I think that’s because there are still ISP and phone pro­viders who are bund­ling Prime with their oth­er ser­vices. It can’t be because their ori­gin­als are of a con­sist­ently high qual­ity because they are not. It’s also only NZ$10.99 com­pared with Netflix Premium (which is NZ$27.99) and the basic plan is still ad-free in New Zealand.

Disney’s brand pro­pos­i­tion sees them come third (NZ$18.99) and Neon ($19.99) are close behind because they still have the pick of the TV con­tent from HBO etc. in the U.S.

Then you have the free ser­vices from our domest­ic tele­vi­sion pro­viders, TVNZ+ and ThreeNow.

What stag­gers me here is that Apple TV+ is so low in the rank­ings that it joins the likes of AMC+ in the “oth­er” category.

I could recom­mend an Apple film or show every week here. They may not have the biggest selec­tion but it is the most con­sist­ent. It has been pro­grammed with taste from the begin­ning and, if you are only just sign­ing up, all their pre­vi­ous ori­gin­als from the past five years are still there. In fact, their fifth highest ranked movie is still Greyhound, the Tom Hanks WWII movie from 2020.

Apple TV+ is in the mid-range of monthly costs (NZ$14.99), has impec­cable tech­nic­al qual­ity (which I can’t say for the worst stream­er in New Zealand, Sky Sports Now) and if you buy an Apple product you get six months free. You’re nuts if you don’t get into it, I think.

In the U.S, Apple TV+ has star­ted adding some block­buster cata­logue movies in 4K to their offer­ing but it’s still only ori­gin­als (includ­ing Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon) here in Aotearoa.

By the way, if you go to the F&S Substack home page, you’ll notice that I have divided entries up by stream­ing pro­vider, in case you are look­ing for some­thing on a par­tic­u­lar platform,.

Now to my recom­mend­a­tion for today – on a ser­vice that also sits in that “oth­er” cat­egory, DocPlay.

The Road to Patagonia played cinemas in Aotearoa in the middle of last year and was one of my most pleas­ant surprises:

No expect­a­tions is the best way to enjoy the Australian doc­u­ment­ary, The Road to Patagonia. It starts with a car crash that grabs you by the lapels and demands that you pay atten­tion. Once it has that atten­tion, it becomes mul­tiple dif­fer­ent films over the 90-minute run­ning time: a travel doc­u­ment­ary, surf movie, love story, anthro­po­lo­gic­al study, spir­itu­al jour­ney, eco­lo­gic­al treat­ise and cam­paign for con­ser­va­tion. Amazingly, it does all of those things really well.

Matty Hannon is an explorer – in more ways than one. Realising that a dead end desk job in Melbourne was giv­ing him depres­sion and anxi­ety, he decides to sell everything he owns and go and find him­self on an epic jour­ney to exper­i­ence the best surf breaks on the Pacific coast of the Americas, from Alaska in the north to the south­ern tip of Latin America in Patagonia.

He thinks that being alone in the wil­der­ness will help sort his head out but it turns out that oth­er people – friends and lov­ers – are more import­ant than he real­ised. Also, that horses and rivers can be people, too.

Also in that June 2024 review: Linklater’s Hit Man; and Despicable Me 4 (co-written by The White Lotus’ Mike White.

Where to watch The Road to Patagonia

Aotearoa and Australia: Streaming on DocPlay

Rest of the world: Not cur­rently avail­able online

Further listening

Here’s a link to last Friday’s con­ver­sa­tion with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights. Emile was in Wellington on Friday so I was able to go into the stu­dio and do the seg­ment face-to-face. What fun!

*JustWatch doesn’t show some video-on-demand rent­al stream­ers like AroVision or NZ Film On Demand.