About TomsTVpicks

Most TV programs are crap, reflecting the fact that TV programming is designed primarily to keep advertisers happy or, in the case of the ABC, to reproduce the values of Australian nationalism. In this blog I try to sort out the wheat from the chaff. If you know of programs coming up that you think a left-wing audience would be interested in hearing about please contact me, Tom Bramble, at tombram@gmail.com. Please "follow" this blog by inserting your email in the box below to the right if you'd like to be sure of getting posts in your email inbox, and tell your friends about this blog (or "share" it on Facebook) if you think they'd like to read it too.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Tom's TV picks w/b 27 June 2011

For a slashing indictment of the position of women in Iran, check out "The Circle" (2000): SBS2 at 11.50pm on Weds 29 June. Grim, but necessarily so given the appalling situation facing women in that country. The director, Jafar Panahi was jailed last year for six years for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic" and there is an international campaign to get him out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jafar_Panahi.

And a double bill next Saturday night (2 July) on ABC2 worth staying in for/ recording. At 8.30pm one of my all-time favourites "Annie Hall" (1977). I know some comrades can't stand Woody Allen and/or Diane Keaton but for me it's very, very funny with endless witty dialogue. Allen gently sends up the obsessions and neuroses of middle class East Coast liberals in what is basically now a time capsule of the mores and manners of the time. Followed by, at 10.05pm, "From Here to Eternity" (1953), a film that is good but could have been great. Set on a military base in Hawaii on the eve of Pearl Harbour it is a romantic melodrama which also comments on the bastardry and sadism of military life. The writer of the original novel, James Jones, disowned the film because McCarthyite pressure forced the film makers to cut out much of the more savage criticism of the US military. But still worth a look if you haven't seen it already.

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