The Day of the Jackal is a riveting and ridiculous ride
Plus: Our verdict on Wicked, a gut-busting piece of local experimental cinema, and a solution for phone addicts everywhere.
Eddie Redmayne’s new globe-trotting assassin thriller is worth putting your phone down for.
This is a vulnerable thing to say as someone who often writes about television for a job, but boy am I really struggling to stay engaged with television these days. The slightest moment of confusion or boredom and I am lured back to my phone to enjoy thousands of videos of llamas pretending to sing emo songs, memes about the trials of rescue dog ownership, and group chats oozing with gossip. How could Industry ever compete?
Last week I interviewed veteran television reviewer Diana Wichtel for My Life in TV (coming tomorrow), and it turns out that even she struggles with her attention span and second-screening. Wichtel described us all as so “culturally drenched” nowadays that retaining interest and even basic information about a TV show is harder than ever (even Thee Diana Wichtel once watched a whole season of a show before realising she’d already seen it).
But in this swamp of confusion and distraction, every now and again a TV show grabs you by both ears and wrenches you out of the social media muck, sometimes even demanding that you binge watch episode after episode while the llamas on Instagram sing to an empty crowd. TVNZ’s new spy thriller The Day of the Jackal is that kind of show, and the perfect factory reset button to hit if you are looking for utterly riveting and utterly ridiculous thrills.
Starring Eddie Redmayne as a high-flying assassin, who hilariously insists on being called “Jackal”, The Day of the Jackal follows him around the globe as he evades capture from the shit-hot MI6 agent Bianca (Lashana Lynch) chasing his fluffy Jackal tail. Already known for being a chameleon (sometimes pushing his ambitions too far), Redmayne’s unnerving and slightly alien energy works perfectly as he adopts endless disguises and personas on the job.
For example, the jaw-dropping opening sequence (which reminded me a lot of the spectacle and rubbery faces of The Dark Knight opener) features Redmayne going incognito as an old German janitor. Soon enough it becomes clear that he’s packing more than mops in his cleaning cart, as he carries out an unwieldy assassination with mucho collateral damage. But it’s his next victim – killed by a single shot from two miles away – that gets the attention of Bianca at MI6.
So begins a worldwide game of cat and mouse, where the cat is a world-leading expert in arms and ammunition, and the mouse has a world-leading collection of transformative bald caps. Both are so addicted to their top secret jobs that their family life suffers – in episode one, we find out that The Jackal has a Mrs Jackal and a Junior Jackal holed up in a Mediterranean mansion somewhere, and Bianca has to miss a parent-teacher meeting to pursue a Jackal-related lead.
Where Mr and Mrs Smith, another spy thriller rebooted for the streaming age, chose to pack the script with modern witty repartee, Jackal is stone cold serious. Sometimes that leads to moments of unintentional comedy, such as when the Jackal meets a potential client looking like one of the three blind mice from Shrek. Other times, plot points and character decisions don’t entirely make sense, or are just absolutely ridiculous (why would you stash all of that in your marital home?).
Watching The Day of the Jackal reminds me of being glued, mouth agape, to the Idris Elba mile-high thriller Hijack from last year. Huge budget, huge movie star, huge stupendous story that would probably, if we’re all being honest, work better as a movie. But given that Jackal is reportedly the most expensive production ever made by Sky in the UK, I suppose they have to put all that cash somewhere. And if it continues to keep me off my phone for even an hour, that’s probably money well spent.
Watch The Day of the Jackal here on TVNZ+
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Why you should watch: Wicked (in cinemas nationwide)
In his review for The Spinoff, Stewart Sowman-Lund praised the performances of the two leads in Wicked, one of the most-anticipated pop culture releases of the year. “Grande has rightly been thrust into the awards spotlight for her turn as Glinda, and is poised to secure the pop-star-turned-film-star slot at the Oscars that many once felt may be reserved for Lady Gaga in Joker (but we all know how that turned out),” he wrote. “Cynthia Erivo is perfectly cast as Elphaba, providing an emotional counter to Grande’s overwhelming glibness. Some of the strongest moments of the film come when the pair are on screen together.” That said, the adaptation of the beloved Broadway musical suffers for being split in two: “what we’re left with is half a film that confusingly declares it is ‘the whole story’, after just telling us we’ll all have to trudge back to the cinema again in 12 months time to learn how it all ends.” While being “a product of Hollywood’s unfortunate obsession with bigger meaning better, it’s also one that has a lot of heart and creative freedom at its core.”
Other pop culture news from The Spinoff
Our gripping local drama After the Party premiered in the United Kingdom yesterday and critics are going absolutely bananas for it.
Has Netflix ‘ANZ’ forgotten about New Zealand? I spoke to members of the local screen industry who are frustrated at being overlooked by the streaming giant.
What Now host Chris Kirk reveals the intricacies of smuggling gunge abroad and bringing the beloved kids show into the digital age for My Life in TV.
Duncan Greive went along to the much-anticipated return season of Camping, and argues that it is the horny, silly play that we need right now.
If you are looking for even more new shows and movies to watch this week, Thomas Giblin’s New to Streaming guide has you covered.
It was fascinating to sit down with Amelia Murray, aka Fazerdaze, and hear about how her personal healing journey informed her incredible new album Soft Power.
Get yourself ready for the weekend with indie-pop darling Heidi Simpson’s ‘theatrical, chaotic and romantic’ weekend playlist.
Why you should read: Books on your phone
The most effective way to stop wasting your life scrolling social media apps is to delete them from your phone. It really is as simple as that! I don’t want to go that far, though – my goal is simply to look at them a lot less, and I have found an easy life hack: I move them into a folder on my phone where it takes an extra couple of swipes and taps to get to them. It is amazing how much less time I’ve spent mindlessly watching videos of things getting crushed in hydraulic presses and insanely filthy rugs being cleaned since doing this.
In the spot where Instagram used to sit on my home screen I put Libby, the library app, and it’s equally amazing how much more I’ve been reading instead of scrolling (Delirium by Damien Wilkins). Obviously reading books on your phone is not ideal, but it’s also not that bad, and it’s a lot better than not reading books at all. And Libby (or whatever app your library uses) means it’s all just a tap away. Better living everyone. / Calum Henderson
Why you should watch: Gut Instinct (in select cinemas now)
I recently caught a few movies at Terror-Fi, New Zealand’s own genre film festival that showcases the best in horror, sci-fi, and other plain freaky shit from around the world. One of the screenings was the world premiere of Gut Instinct, a “one-of-a-kind, epic, eye-popping experiment” by local filmmaker Doug Dillaman, and truly unlike anything I’ve seen in a cinema before. The post-apocalyptic public service announcement, cleverly cobbled together from an unthinkable amount of archival footage, turns the audience from slack-jawed cinemagoers into active participants in an “Audiovisual Purification Programme”. Incorporating surprise live elements and even culinary accompaniments, I left the cinema thinking waaaay more movies should embrace interactive elements. If you’ve got a tolerance for buzzy graphics and a relatively strong stomach, there’s a roadshow happening around the country in coming weeks – you’ll never look at Hershey’s chocolate the same way again. / AC
Before we pop off…
Are you up-to-date with The Spinoff’s mall ranking series? Click here for the Christchurch instalment and here for the Auckland behemoth.
The Eras tour might be nearing its end, but academia is just getting started: inside the very first Taylor Swift university course in Australasia
Gender is a construct etc, but I’ll admit I really enjoyed reading all about Gladiator and other movies that regularly reduce grown men to tears.
Also loved this conversation on Ensemble between writer Megan Dunn and musician Nadia Reid about music, mermaids and motherhood.
Still cannot believe someone stole Pepper the Cockatoo from Staglands. Keep your eyes peeled for a bird saying “hello, darling” with two claws missing.
That’s it for Rec Room for this week. If you liked what you read, why not share Rec Room with your friends and whānau.
