HD Heads-Up: Eagle vs Shark

The network TV premiere of the crowdpleasing Kiwi comedy, Eagle vs Shark, will be in HD.

It airs 8.30pm Friday on TV3, complete with 5.1 audio.

The geeky, goofy comedy notched up nearly $1 million at the box office and stars Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement and Loren Horsley as looney, lonelyheart losers for whom true love takes a twisted and, for the viewer, increasingly tortuous path.

The charm of the leads and writer Taika Waititi’s enterprising direction keep Eagle vs Shark from imploding with idiosyncratic navel-gazing.

But the hilarious trailer showed how much funnier the movie could have been with tighter writing and editing, not to mention a plot that offered more to ponder than bizarre behaviour.

Waititi’s second feature, Boy, which was inspired by his Oscar-nominated short, Two Cars, One Night, screened in the opening weekend of the Sundance Film Festival and will be released here theatrically on March 25.