Eagle vs. Shark (Taika Cohen, 2007)

Eagle vs. SharkAs Napoleon Dynamite‘s New Zealand cousin, Taika Cohen’s off-kilter comedy of social awkwardness shares its American counterpart’s obsession with observing the trivial daily interactions of sad-sack outcasts who are either blissfully unaware of their ridiculousness or just amusingly pathetic. I guess you have to have a taste for this kind of comedy, and while some of it is chuckle-worthy and parts of it have a real tenderness in spite of the film’s inherently distancing geekiness, the story has what can only be described as an underlying meanness that is never quite resolved in the end, leaving us to wonder if Cohen is just unaware of how the film’s central relationship is based on cruelty and masochism or if that’s the point. (DVD)