What to Watch
Most film reviewers pretty quickly come to the conclusion there are not many films in the world that couldn’t be improved by having at least 10 or 20 minutes cut out of them. An editor friend of mine, who has a couple of New Zealand’s best films on her CV, often used to tell me ‘‘that scene could use a damn good haircut’’, whenever we were discussing the merits of some sequence we were assembling.
Much as I adored Scorsese’s The Irishman (Netflix), I am open to the argument that it could have been an even better film – or at least a more accessible one, which many people would say is the same thing – if it had 30 minutes slashed from it.
It’s a fine line between gravitas and selfindulgence, as someone should have once said.
But I’ve never really minded a lengthy documentary.
That is, until I started watching Netflix’s rather good Explained series.
Explained is a collection of short (25-minute) documentary films, expanding every week, on an astonishing array of subjects.
From orgasms to billionaires, marijuana to active-wear, racial inequality in wealth to modern-day slavery, Explained is a broad church, taking in subjects from across the spectrum.
The genius of the show is the running time. By paring each subject down to its most essential elements, Explained makes documentary accessible to an audience (I won’t say ‘‘a generation’’. This proud Gen Xer is too smart to
Much as I adored Scorsese’s The Irishman, I am open to the argument that it could have been an even better film if it had 30 minutes slashed from it.
buy into that divisive nonsense) that doesn’t spend too much time browsing the non-fiction sections of the streaming services. And yet, Explained isn’t watered down or sensationalised ‘‘edutainment’’.
The facts are presented, the talking heads are experts in their fields, and the narration is engagingly delivered. Every episode I’ve watched has been an excellent standalone film. After trying a few, you might ask, why can’t more documentaries be 25 minutes’ long?
And, am I the last person on the planet to get behind Peaky Blinders? Debuting in
2014, Peaky Blinders should have become my favourite show immediately. But, I was living in Paeka¯ ka¯ riki, with chickens to tend, so somehow it passed me by.
No more. After bingeing the first series in a few nights, I’m already anxious there are only four more series to go. Peaky Blinders is a saga of a crime family making their bones in the mean streets of Birmingham in the decades between the world wars. It is literate, brutal and dripping with wit and intelligence.
Cillian Murphy and Sam Neill star, among a constellation of others. If you’re still missing The Wire, Deadwood or Sons of Anarchy, get in. Available from Alice’s, Aro Street Video, or Netflix.