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Eagle Vs Shark - 4/4
This film feels like it has been built after a lot of acting workshops where the same characters develop into real people over the course of the studio sessions before they're just perfect for the big screen.
People have called this another Napoleon Dynamite but there is so much more to this than a vague similarity to an admittedly brilliant film. This is a bigger film, it has a third dimension in that we get a female perspective of a pathological, absurd charlatan. A ruined man who rejects the positives that the world offers him in preference for the elaborate yet incompetent deceit he has regaled himself and his band of onlookers with.
The heroine Lily is a mouse with no pizzazz. Assuredly a shrinking violet through our first introduction, then quite obviously a fantastic example of positivity against cynicism. She commands every major plot point and yet we feel like we are on somebody else's quest for much of the film.
This film very nearly made me cry, not a rare feat generally speaking these days but for a comedy with a potty mouth, a wicked sense of humour (of abundant laugh-out-loud moments and lines so consistently funny that surely three viewings will still yield a very respectable laugh ratio) and a heart of gold it is unusual. Especially since the scene that did it was an analogous stop motion animation about apples
In summary this is a quirky, irreverent film about some incredibly idiosyncratic people with an undercurrent of deep emotional issues. None of it is cheap, at least it doesn't feel that way to me. I feel like Taika Waititi and Loren Horsley must have really loved these characters. It's warming to see a film with this much attention to character behind it.
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