Jill's Film Festival Diary for Tuesday, April 17

Films: Eagle Vs. Shark, City In Heat

Future Screenings: Eagle Vs. Shark: No future screenings scheduled, but we hear the movie's going into wide release this summer.
City In Heat: No future screenings.

Well folks, this is it for me. Twenty-one movies in twelve days. I'm not going to tonight's closing night festivities (I'm reviewing a play), but I don't mind: my Festival experience ended on a very high note.

Eagle Vs. Shark
Imagine if the kids from Napoleon Dynamite grew up in New Zealand. And that they only got more socially awkward as they aged. If you can imagine that, you can pretty much imagine Eagle Vs. Shark, a sweet and funny romantic comedy about losers. Big losers.

How big? Well, she can't even hold down her job at a fast food restaurant (great movement early on when she describes the "Crazy" burger: two meat patties with a bun in between), and he works at a GameStop-like store, and has parties in which he delights in kicking people's asses at a primitive Mortal Combat-like game. Their first sexual encounter lasts all of fifteen seconds, and is preempted by: "Would you like to have sex?" A few days later, the two set off so that he can train to fight the Samoan bully from his childhood. That's when we meet his exceptionally quirky family and a childhood friend who's a computer hacker with a dial-up modem and a pornographic computer virus.

The film is good fun if you're okay with laughing at socially awkward, sometimes uncomfortable, moments. I am. But for those who weren't fans of Napoleon Dynamite, Eagle Vs. Shark probably isn't for you. Festival's over, so ratings don't really matter, but I'd give this one somewhere between Good and Very Good.

City in Heat
I was actually pretty upset that I hadn't caught any Spanish-language films during the Festival. The one Spanish film I saw, period, was The Kovak Box, and it was in English. Fortunately, Argentinian film City in Heat, which I didn't catch during the Festival itself because the screenings were sold out, was named to the Festival Favorites, and for good reason. It's a beautiful film with an unlikely premise: a man calls three of his oldest friends together and then kills himself on the appointed date, leaving his ashes to one of them, a woman who all three men had dated. The film is actually a surprisingly funny exploration of the parallels between love and death: one romance starts in a mausoleum, another blossoms as a man discusses his deceased father. The characters feel like real people, if a little unusual, and the script is full of quotable lines (for instance: the appeal of dating a short woman is that "everything is closer together") and truly memorable moments. I will say, though, that I'm glad I'm a Spanish speaker: the subtitles could go a little fast sometimes, and some of the little quirks and expressions of the language get lost in translation anyway—there were a few instances in the subtitles where a Spanish word remained in quotes, because there's really no equivalent in the English language. (Two translated songs lose a lot in the subtitles, too.) That aside, this was definitely one of my favorite films in the Festival. No ballot here, but I'd give it an Excellent.