Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 30 August

Pokémon Detective Pikachu (Letterman, 2019) is streaming on Netflix

It’s the 26^th birth­day for Netflix today so it feels churl­ish not to give them this slot.

I also haven’t done a fam­ily film for a while so, after con­sid­er­able rum­ma­ging around the “Kids & Family” sec­tion of the Netflix AU/NZ web­site I came across this title that I had sur­pris­ingly warm memor­ies of.

One one level Pokémon Detective Pikachu is just cor­por­ate exploit­a­tion of pre-existing IP to pro­mote unsus­tain­able con­sump­tion and Nintendo more dom­in­ance of the ‘atten­tion economy’.

But on anoth­er, it was a fun reward for fans who are among the least tri­bal that I know.

Ryan Reynolds is the voice of the furry little guy with the deer­stalk­er hat – a spinoff from a spe­cif­ic recent Pokémon game – and he teams up with a teen­age boy (Justice Smith) to solve crimes:

In the film, Pokémon are wild creatures that need to be cap­tured and “trained” by humans in order to com­pete against each oth­er (like horse racing or, if you have a dark­er per­spect­ive, bear bait­ing). There is one place where humans and Pokémon live in har­mony, where rela­tion­ships between the spe­cies is more like the part­ner­ship between people and their dae­mons in His Dark Materials, and where Pokémon fight­ing is illeg­al. Ryme City has an inter­est­ing look – London land­marks covered in Japanese-style icon­o­graphy sur­round­ing a Hong Kong-like bay.

I reviewed this at the time for RNZ Widescreen and thought that it was much more suc­cess­ful than it had any right to be.

I’ve talked about how the ami­able pres­ence of Reynolds helps make the film enter­tain­ing but I should also add that dir­ect­or Rob Letterman and cine­ma­to­graph­er John Mathieson (and all their col­lab­or­at­ors) have gone out of their way to make the film feel like a film. They’ve shot the pic­ture on old fash­ioned Kodak cel­lu­loid – and you can tell – and as much of the film as pos­sible has been shot prac­tic­ally in real loc­a­tions rather than in front of giant green screens.

It’s a les­son that many of these fantasy films could do with learn­ing – that the more fant­ast­ic­al the story you want to tell, the more groun­ded and believ­able what you are see­ing needs to be. Fans already think these little mon­sters are as good as real. It’s a sign of good faith that they can watch the film and noth­ing – or noth­ing much – can chal­lenge that faith.

The film also has Bill Nighy as vil­lain so +1 for that, too.

Today I also dis­covered that Netflix – like all of the oth­er stream­ers that are part of the AMPTP pro­du­cers’ organ­isa­tion I sup­pose – release cer­tain films into cinemas for just long enough to be eli­gible for Academy Award con­sid­er­a­tion but not so long that they become the­at­ric­al releases for the pur­poses of their con­tracts with tal­ent, thus avoid­ing pay­ing prop­er the­at­ric­al scale residuals.

This strike is reveal­ing a great deal about how the mod­ern stu­dio sys­tem exploits the cre­at­ors who they rely on for their con­tent and I don’t want my fea­tur­ing of that con­tent here to imply any endorse­ment of their methods.

It’s an awful situ­ation but the stakes are high and if writers and act­ors lose this battle then audi­ences will lose too.