Eagle vs. Shark
Directed and written by Taika Waititi
New Zealand Film Commission, 2007
88 mins.
* * *
New Zealand director Taika Waititi is better known to North Americans as Taika Cohen, the director of the offbeat Flight of the Conchords videos. (He is half Maori and half Jewish.) His 2007 feature film Eagle vs. Shark raised eyebrows at several independent film festivals, won a couple of awards, and was a finalist for the grand prize at Sundance. It didn’t win the latter and we think we know why; it’s simply too weird to evaluate objectively. We found ourselves enjoying this offbeat comedy and would recommend you give it a try, but we also suggest you have a backup film. It’s like licorice ice cream—you’ll either love it or hate it.
There are several reasons to see it. It takes us inside lifestyles that are unlike those of most of us, it treats us to surrealistic flashes of humor, and it’s simply unlike anything Hollywood would ever dream of green lighting. Describing the film is hard, but here goes.
First of all, think of the Wechsler intelligence scale. People with IQs between 80 and 90 are classified as “dull normal.” Most of the characters in this film are decidedly on the “dull” range of the spectrum; they are those often glibly labeled as “losers” by those with greater mental and economic resources (and the ones we picked on in high school). Lily (the angular Loren Holloway) is a hard-luck counter clerk at a fast-food joint called Meaty Boy Burger, a superb send-up of McDonalds-style gut-buster menus. She lives with her brother Damon, who raised her when their parents died, and who ekes out a marginal living as a cartoonist and amuses others with horribly inept impressions of celebrities that poor Lily thinks are spot-on. Lily has a heart of gold, but she’s just bad at everything she does… guitar, poetry, make-up, socializing…. In fact, she’s not even competent enough to keep her job at Meaty Boy. Her saving graces are her goodness and that she has enough sense to realize that the best she’s likely to do is hook up with someone who is her intellectual equal.
Enter Jarrod, who lacks Lily’s self-awareness. He’s vaguely handsome, but most women won’t give him a second look because he’s as dumb as a post. He’s a dweeb who thinks he’s out-grown childhood dorkiness and harbors a revenge fantasy against those who mistreated him in the past. He sells video games, which is pretty much the top of his calling, though he props himself up by surrounding himself with mates who are even duller than he. As the king of this roost—one meaning of the eagle in the film’s title—Jarrod invents a back story of a dead mother, a brother who died in an athletic competition, and a fail-safe plan to exact revenge on past tormenters. His veneer of coolness is hair-thin; his only real talent lies in playing video games.
Jarrod and Lily connect at a theme party where everyone is dressed as their favorite animals. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to deconstruct the symbolism of Lily’s shark and Jarrod’s eagle costumes. They are projections of what they want to be. Lily is really a milquetoast sardine who gets gobbled by real-life sharks, and Jarrod is a very ordinary sparrow—an awkward fledgling at that. After Lily meets Jarrod in the video game final of the party and deliberately throws the match, the two end up in bed together in one of the more bizarre and funny seduction scenes of recent memory. The two then make their way to Jarrod’s hometown, where Jarrod plans to fight his boyhood nemesis and claim his manhood. We’ll not reveal more except to say that Jarrod hasn’t been on the up-and-up about his family or his friends back home. Be prepared to meet an unforgettable and weird cast of characters. The plot—such as it is—revolves around the question of whether Jarrod will arrive at Lily’s realistic sense of self and stay with her.
We admired this film for its grit. There’s no Hollywood glamour here. For these characters, a person who can actually keep a job is successful, and one flush enough to be able to rent a car is rich. It challenges us to rethink what we mean by happiness. Is it a collection of material objects, a satisfying career, or merely the ability to accept who you are and make the best of it? Whether this film is your cup of tea will depend on your tolerance for occasionally amateurish filmmaking, whether you find Waititi’s animation sequences poignant or mawkish, and if you’ve got the patience to look beyond awkward surfaces. The more we thought of it, the better it seemed, but—as we said—have a backup plan just in case.
Directed and written by Taika Waititi
New Zealand Film Commission, 2007
88 mins.
* * *
New Zealand director Taika Waititi is better known to North Americans as Taika Cohen, the director of the offbeat Flight of the Conchords videos. (He is half Maori and half Jewish.) His 2007 feature film Eagle vs. Shark raised eyebrows at several independent film festivals, won a couple of awards, and was a finalist for the grand prize at Sundance. It didn’t win the latter and we think we know why; it’s simply too weird to evaluate objectively. We found ourselves enjoying this offbeat comedy and would recommend you give it a try, but we also suggest you have a backup film. It’s like licorice ice cream—you’ll either love it or hate it.
There are several reasons to see it. It takes us inside lifestyles that are unlike those of most of us, it treats us to surrealistic flashes of humor, and it’s simply unlike anything Hollywood would ever dream of green lighting. Describing the film is hard, but here goes.
First of all, think of the Wechsler intelligence scale. People with IQs between 80 and 90 are classified as “dull normal.” Most of the characters in this film are decidedly on the “dull” range of the spectrum; they are those often glibly labeled as “losers” by those with greater mental and economic resources (and the ones we picked on in high school). Lily (the angular Loren Holloway) is a hard-luck counter clerk at a fast-food joint called Meaty Boy Burger, a superb send-up of McDonalds-style gut-buster menus. She lives with her brother Damon, who raised her when their parents died, and who ekes out a marginal living as a cartoonist and amuses others with horribly inept impressions of celebrities that poor Lily thinks are spot-on. Lily has a heart of gold, but she’s just bad at everything she does… guitar, poetry, make-up, socializing…. In fact, she’s not even competent enough to keep her job at Meaty Boy. Her saving graces are her goodness and that she has enough sense to realize that the best she’s likely to do is hook up with someone who is her intellectual equal.
Enter Jarrod, who lacks Lily’s self-awareness. He’s vaguely handsome, but most women won’t give him a second look because he’s as dumb as a post. He’s a dweeb who thinks he’s out-grown childhood dorkiness and harbors a revenge fantasy against those who mistreated him in the past. He sells video games, which is pretty much the top of his calling, though he props himself up by surrounding himself with mates who are even duller than he. As the king of this roost—one meaning of the eagle in the film’s title—Jarrod invents a back story of a dead mother, a brother who died in an athletic competition, and a fail-safe plan to exact revenge on past tormenters. His veneer of coolness is hair-thin; his only real talent lies in playing video games.
Jarrod and Lily connect at a theme party where everyone is dressed as their favorite animals. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to deconstruct the symbolism of Lily’s shark and Jarrod’s eagle costumes. They are projections of what they want to be. Lily is really a milquetoast sardine who gets gobbled by real-life sharks, and Jarrod is a very ordinary sparrow—an awkward fledgling at that. After Lily meets Jarrod in the video game final of the party and deliberately throws the match, the two end up in bed together in one of the more bizarre and funny seduction scenes of recent memory. The two then make their way to Jarrod’s hometown, where Jarrod plans to fight his boyhood nemesis and claim his manhood. We’ll not reveal more except to say that Jarrod hasn’t been on the up-and-up about his family or his friends back home. Be prepared to meet an unforgettable and weird cast of characters. The plot—such as it is—revolves around the question of whether Jarrod will arrive at Lily’s realistic sense of self and stay with her.
We admired this film for its grit. There’s no Hollywood glamour here. For these characters, a person who can actually keep a job is successful, and one flush enough to be able to rent a car is rich. It challenges us to rethink what we mean by happiness. Is it a collection of material objects, a satisfying career, or merely the ability to accept who you are and make the best of it? Whether this film is your cup of tea will depend on your tolerance for occasionally amateurish filmmaking, whether you find Waititi’s animation sequences poignant or mawkish, and if you’ve got the patience to look beyond awkward surfaces. The more we thought of it, the better it seemed, but—as we said—have a backup plan just in case.
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