|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Details
- Aspect ratio: 1.85:1 widescreen
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound
- Spanish language track with Spanish and French subtitles
- Suggested retail price: $29.99 (DVD; Blue-Ray not available)
The Movie
Are you in the market for a Napoleon Dynamite knock-off where the characters have an increased patina of patheticness for being a decade older? No? How about if I throw in some très sexy Kiwi accents?
Well, hopefully you’re sold because in terms of recommending the Miramax release Eagle vs. Shark, that’s about all I’ve got. It is an interesting phenomenon to me that in recent years we’ve apparently replaced the old saying “from the mouths of babes” with “from the actions of idiots.” Apparently some people out there think there is a lot to be learned about life by watching imbeciles interact. Maybe it is just elitist snobbery on my part but I’m not seeing it.
In this New Zealand import that only saw a very limited theatrical run last year, two underachievers collide. Lily (Loren Horsley) is a wallflower working at a fast food restaurant where she has become smitten with Jarrod (Jemaine Clement, known to a few thousand Americans from HBO’s Flight of the Conchords) for no apparent reason.
She invites herself to a costume party Jarrod is having where everybody is supposed to dress as their favorite animal (she a shark, he an eagle: thus the title that really has no other relevance to the movie), then impresses him by being good at video games. They have very awkward sex and are then a couple.
It turns out that he’s been on a 10-year mission to train himself into being able to finally retaliate against a home town bully and takes her along to meet his family and watch his victory. Of course, each member of his family is equally though uniquely off.
You won’t meet the bully until the end of the movie but let me assure you that by the time you learn about him you’ll be more than sympathetic to his actions.
The movie does have some clever dialog and a couple completely-out-of-left-field scenes that are bizarrely amusing. Unfortunately it is all in support of characters that apparently have no redeeming elements, and in the face of this oddball love the only reasonable thought is, “Oh, please let them be sterile.”
The Extras
Deleted Scenes – Thirteen deleted or extended scenes are presented, totaling about 15 minutes. Most aren’t of any interest beyond showing that there are generally very good reasons for things to be cut from a movie, but a few shed some new light or show interesting alternative courses the movie could have taken. Extras can be viewed with or without commentary by director Taika Waititi.
Outtakes – Just a few minutes long and all your standard flubbed lines.
Commentary Track – Director Taika Waititi (who also has film credits as Taika Cohen) provided a commentary and is joined throughout by one cast member or another. Loren Horsely (Lily) joins him for the first third of the movie by phone, which oddly requires Waititi to explain to her what is happening on screen. Joel Tobeck (who plays Lily’s brother, Damien, in all of about 8 minutes of total screen time) gets to join in the middle part. Craig Hall also spends some time in the recording booth. Jemaine Clement does not contribute. It is a pretty basic “this was fun, I liked that, here’s an inside joke” type commentary with no real insights offered.
Audio, Video, and Interface
Eagle vs. Shark was a low-budget affair and on DVD it isn’t going to be used by anybody to showcase the abilities of their new HD TV. That said, it is presented in its original widescreen aspect ratio and looks mostly fine, even on good TVs. There are a few scenes that seem a little muddy but with such a small production it is hard to know if that is a problem with the DVD or from the original product.
The audio is also nothing to blow anybody away. This is a talking movie with long silences.
The Final Evaluation
Unless you are a huge fan of the Napoleon Dynamite-style of humor (and I did enjoy much of that movie, it just isn’t a very deep well so far as I am concerned) there just isn’t much reason to seek out this DVD. Fans of Flight of the Conchords might be interested in seeing other work from Jemaine Clement. There’s a decent soundtrack as well as some interesting interstitial animations throughout the movie. In the end, it is also interesting to see that apparently painful social awkwardness apparently looks the same in New Zealand as in the United States.
