Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 19 November

The Killer (Fincher, 2023)

The editor-in-chief and I are still fuming about the way that season two of The Diplomat (Netflix) ended. At the end of episode four, thanks in large part to a terrific climax, cliffhanger and performance from Rory Kinnear as the articulate-but-insecure prime minister Trowbridge, I was fully expecting to be able to recommend it here today.

But two episodes later and the show managed to sell itself, its characters and its audience out so completely that we won’t be back for season three. What a shame, it was excellent, intelligent escapist television there for a while.

So, we have an unexpected gap to fill and I thought I would go back and see what we were discussing back in November 2023 – all those years ago.

David Fincher’s The Hitman is just one of many recent hired killer themed films and shows – still very much the zeitgeist as a new version of The Day of the Jackal appears to be winning plaudits despite being ten episodes long – and I felt at the time that it had been misunderstood by many of my colleagues. The prevailing sense at the time was that it was minor-league Fincher, an exercise in style over substance.

I’d just written about Fincher’s earlier work for RNZ so was, perhaps, looking at it more from an auteur point of view than as disposable Netflix entertainment:

Michael Fassbender plays a hitman. If you believe his inner narrator, he’s a very good one and like so many of these characters who believe they are some kind of samurai (they have a code, etc.) he has a very high opinion of himself. But he’s a character in a David Fincher film which means that high opinion of himself isn’t always backed up by the objective facts on the screen.

Dryly amusing, expertly made, suitably globetrotting, casually violent, The Killeris much more entertaining than I was expecting. The lyrics at every Smiths needledrop are always perfect.

In a recent interview, Fincher has said that he’s not much interested in making important films (if he ever was) but The Killer has a layer or two that elevates it above the usual films in this genre. Perhaps Fincher is too modest, perhaps it’s misdirection, but there’s always more to his films than meets the eye.

At time of writing, I’m about to get on a train into the city to join a protest march – possibly my first protest since I was a student following well-known firebrand Andrew Little. That was protesting the introduction of student fees and loans, an issue that affected me personally.

Today’s hikoi is about something much more profound – an attempt by one small political party to rewrite New Zealand history and permanently secure already entrenched social, political and economic power over indigenous people. The so-called Treaty Principles Bill is a crime against New Zealand as well as a crime against history and logic.

So, despite my personal privilege insulating me from the direct effects of the bill, I’ll go and be present and support those whose rights are being threatened.

But while I’m thinking about politics, here’s another film that I reviewed in that newsletter a year ago, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes:

Like the original films, it pays not to cogitate too deeply on the logic behind any of it, but the ongoing themes of cruelty as entertainment, entertainment as distraction, distraction as a tool wielded by the powerful to subdue the masses, are, if anything, stronger in this one.

…

Seeing the early development of the ideas behind the Hunger Games, as opposed to their high-tech eventuality, hits pretty hard when our real world screens are full of destruction – of concrete, and flesh, and dreams. This is what happens when we stop seeing whole categories of people as human.

I’ve pulled that newsletter out from behind the paywall so you can read the whole thing. It also features the monster video game adaptation, Five Nights At Freddy’s and Saltburn (although the less said about that the better).

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Where to watch The Killer

Worldwide: Streaming on Netflix