Tom's TV picks week beginning 23 October

Just a quick, cut down version as too busy to do much more, but some things definitely worth catching in the next week:

Sunday 8.30pm SBS1: Dateline has a feature on the Syrian revolt, followed immediately afterwards by:

Sunday 9.30pm SBS 1: "My Lai": documentary on massacre in Vietnam when US troops wiped out an entire village. Remember this when you hear the US crowing about bringing freedom to Libya.

Monday 8.30pm ABC1: 4 Corners: feature on Australia's brutal refugee detention centres. An inside look.

Thursday 8.30pm SBS2: "China Blue": documentary about conditions of Chinese factory workers.

Saturday 10.20pm SBS1: "Hunger": film about Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands. Harrowing but demonstration of indomitable spirit of the hunger strikers in their campaign for political prisoner status

Tom's TV picks w/b 11 September

Cologne following Allied bombing raid in 1944.

What else to say, it's been "all 9/11, all the channels, all the time" on TV lately and of course today will be no exception. As a welcome counterpoint to this 9/11 media/political necrophilia (attaining satisfaction from the bodies of the dead), SBS1 is screening THE BOMBING OF GERMANY on FRIDAY night at 8.30pm. Although the blurb suggests that this documentary will tie itself up in liberal knots judging the morals of the industrial-scale massacres of German civilians by US bombing raids in World War II, and although it is extremely unlikely that SBS programmers have scheduled this documentary for this purpose, it will at least serve as a reminder that Al Qaeda did not invent the use of aeroplanes as a means to inflict carnage on innocents.

It's a big week for programmes about the War on Terror and not just the obvious 9/11 features. On TUESDAY night at 8.30pm SBS1 is showing WIKI SECRETS, a documentary about Bradley Manning and the mass leaking of US military secrets last year. SATURDAY night (10.15pm) has the same channel showing the film SECRETS OF STATE (2009), a thriller depicting the abuses of the French secret service, the DGSE, in its hunt for "terrorists". I'm a bit torn by this film. It depicts the kind of abuses engaged in by the French secret service, the DGSE, in its hunt for terrorists. The French anti-terrorist apparatus is shown to be highly amoral and an enemy of basic human rights, both of its own agents and also its victims. It's also got a gripping story line. But it doesn't really question the underlying motives of the French state and indeed, at the film's finish the director appears even to justify these abuses in the name of "whatever it takes". So, be warned.

And then there are two films that explore the effects of ideological conditioning similar to that to which we have been exposed in saturation doses over the past ten years. First, on WEDNESDAY night at 10.05pm, SBS1 is showing THE WAVE (2008), a German movie that explores how easily fascistic "groupthink" can operate in a classroom context. The movie is based on a real-life 1967 experiment by Californian teacher Ron Jones who got students to role-play a microcosm of a fascist state in class over several days before having to cancel the experiment abruptly as it got completely out of hand. More on this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave. The same totalitarian conformism is also evident in Danish film DELIVER US FROM EVIL (2009) on SATURDAY night on SBS2 at 9.30pm. A small-town neo-Nazi successfully blames a refugee for the death of an elderly resident and mobilises the wrath of the townsfolk against him.

Finally, for something completely different, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) is showing on ABC2 on SATURDAY night at 8.30pm. A remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954), it's lighter in tone and considerably shorter but doesn't suffer much in being so. A Western, in which seven unlikely characters all operating with mixed and usually quite selfish motives band together to save a town. Fair doses of cool humour and glimpses of human frailty amongst the tough guys keep it humming along. I suppose if you look at it critically you could say that it has a liberal imperialist tone to it (terrorised Mexican villagers ask an American gunslinger to save them from a heinous bandit when in fact the main danger Mexicans faced was the US itself which stole one third of their land mass in the 19th century) but I'm willing to put this aside in favour of its many virtues.

Not a vintage week then, by any means, but some stuff worth catching amidst all the 9/11 militaristic tub-thumping.

Update on Tom's TV picks 21 August

Just a quick note for those following this blog. I am currently (12 August to 9 September) on leave in the Northern Territory and have very intermittent access to the internet. Next TV Picks will be posted on my return to Brisbane probably on Sunday 11 September. Apologies for the interruption!

Tom's TV picks w/b 14 August

A week since I wrote my last TV picks and in the meantime the world seems to have blown up. First on Friday, the financial speculators who have enjoyed an enormous surge in their incomes in the past two years took time off from buying gold plated yachts and Mercedes limousines to sell off in bulk from the world's stock markets, driving indices down around the world in the biggest slump since 2008. And then on Saturday night the youth of Britain, particularly but not exclusively black youth, rose up in an insurrectionary wave of revolt which spread quickly from Tottenham to cities across the country and stretched from one night to the next. Condemned to a life of police harassment, joblessness and no future, these youth went out and took their revenge on the society that has condemned them to the scrap heap. Two apparently quite disconnected events, but actually both intimately connected, both the product of a capitalist system deep in crisis.

The media of course completely avoided seeing these developments as in any way linked and treated those who have destroyed whole economies as respectable pillars of society, those who have burned down a few shops as mindless criminals deserving nothing less than water cannon, rubber bullets and lengthy jail terms. From the shock jocks to the "serious" news on the BBC, Al Jazeera and ABC, the coverage of the British riots has been nothing less than scandalous, any pretence at "objective" journalism thrown to the wind. So god knows what DATELINE on SUNDAY night at 8.30pm on SBS1 will come up with. The title of the segment "ANARCHY IN THE UK" suggests that we should expect the worst!

Race is also a consistent theme of some of the better stuff on TV this week. On WEDNESDAY night at 10.20pm, ABC2 is screening SKIN DEEP: THE STORY OF SANDRA LAING. This is a remarkable documentary which tells the true story of Sandra Laing, a child born in South Africa in the 1950s to staunchly Nationalist Afrikaaner parents but who is, as racial classifications go, to all intents black. This is of course a huge embarassment to her dad who goes all the way to the Supreme Court to try to prove that she is in fact white. Sandra is sent to an all-white school where she is mercilessly taunted and abused and eventually thrown out. In her teens she forms a relationship with a young black man and is told by her father that she must choose between her boyfriend and her family. No Spencer Tracy woolly liberalism ("Guess Who's Coming to Dinner") here - no doubt it doesn't help that her beau is a vegetable peddler not a jet-setting Yale-qualified MD. Much to her credit, Sandra tells her dad to get stuffed and is promptly cut off. She then goes to live with her new husband in a black village. A tale of true courage but also immense cruelty as people are judged not by their character but the colour of their skin, to use Martin Luther King's turn of phrase.

And then on SATURDAY, we're back with Sidney Poitier for a second double billing on ABC2 to follow up on THE DEFIANT ONES and GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER? (showing on 13 August). This week it's IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (8.30pm) and TO SIR WITH LOVE (10.20pm), both shot in 1967. The first is a classic. It won five Oscars and, like The Defiant Ones, teams Poitier up with a racist who gradually softens. Unfortunately in this case, it's not two prisoners on the run, but two cops - Virgil Tibbs, Poitier's detective from the north, and the Rod Steiger character, a redneck Southern sheriff - who are at the centre of the story. It's a murder mystery but also a look at the deep racism of Mississippi in the 1960s. TO SIR WITH LOVE is altogether different. Sentimental and largely ignoring the issue of race, it features Poitier playing an engineer from Guyana who, unable get work in his profession, winds up teaching in a "dead-end" school in London's East End. As usual with these sort of inspirational stories of wonderful teachers who win over a group of tough kids, you are really expected to hope that the classroom experience will triumph over the crushing adversity that these young people face on the outside. The riots in Britain this past week, however, tell a rather different and more sober story.

Back to MONDAY, to finish off, SBS1 is showing SECRET OF THE GRAIN (2007) at 10.30pm. A film about a Tunisian-French shipyard worker in the south of France who is cast aside in his early 60s by his employer as "non-economic" and who turns in his enforced "retirement" to opening up a restaurant featuring North African food . Slimane quickly enlists his family members and friends in his new venture which is created in the upturned hull of a ship. A slow moving slice of life with quite a bit of improvisation that gives it a documentary feel at times. Something of a tragicomedy with desperation alongside moments of humour and optimism it's worth a look.

Tom's TV picks w/b 7 August

So DEADWOOD is heading towards its finale, the penultimate episode this MONDAY on ABC2 at 9.30pm. It says something about the quality of this series that, although many of its leading characters are so unpleasant, parasitical or otherwise highly objectionable, it is so damned involving and such unmissable TV. The town of Deadwood is divided between the "Good" Guys (very broadly defined!), ranging from the saintly (e.g. Doc Cochran and Trixie) to the scoundrels (e.g. Swearengen), and the Complete Bastards (e.g. Hearst, Woolcott and Tolliver). But none of them is perfect (well, perhaps with the exception of the Doc) and all of them are such well-drawn characters and so well acted that you follow them all with interest. One of my favourite characters is the utterly loathsome E.B. Farnum, the hotel-keeper, a reptilian figure, a toady to the rich and powerful, a tyrant to the weak - a creation worse in these regards even than Mr Collins, Jane Austen's vile country parson in Pride and Prejudice - another of my "so awful he's a pleasure to watch" crew. And Al Swearengen - an all-time great creation of TV played so well by Ian McShane. Hardly plausible that a brothel owner would speak like a character out of Shakespeare but what force he gives to his words!

Deadwood is not just an enjoyable tale of rivalry on the Western frontier but also a metaphor for the rise of monopoly capitalism. Deadwood in its buccaneering heyday of independent prospectors and brothel owners illustrates the notion that "anyone" can make it rich on the frontier. There's no bank, no laws, no government, so the small bourgeois in the town (Tolliver and Swearengen) get to make the rules. But threats keep emanating from the east in the form of Government (Yankton and Montana) and Big Capital (Hearst). Big Capital brooks no obstacle and is willing to use Pinkertons and other strongarm methods to get its way. So Hearst murders union organisers and squeezes out rival business operators in order to sew up the whole town - you can see from the outset that Alma Garrett's friendly neighbourhood bank is either going to have to get big or go under. The Sioux and other Native Americans are also virtually wiped out. The independent prospectors are bought out or forced off and replaced by wage labour under the command of Big Capital. Eventually, the takeover is complete and Big Capital (in the form of Hearst) moves on to conquer new territories on its way westwards towards the Pacific Ocean and the subjugation of the American continent.

Well, that turned out to be a bit of an essay, so less detail on what follows...

MONDAY night (SBS2 at 10.30pm) also features THE COLOUR OF PARADISE (1999), a beautiful and touching film about a blind young Iranian boy, Mohammed, who returns home from his school in Tehran to his village for a three month summer break to the joy of his grandmother and sisters but the chagrin of his dad who regards him as an embarassment and a potential obstacle to his pending marriage. Dad, Hashem, tries to palm him off to the village carpenter for an apprenticeship. But all Mohammed wants is the love of his father. Great camerawork, impressive acting and heart-rending material.

Another great movie on WEDNESDAY night (SBS1 at 10.05pm) - THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006) which tells the story of an East German intelligence (Stasi) operative who is sent to spy on a "dissident" playwright and who, through his growing disgust with his assignment, gradually "turns" on his masters. This film just gives some small inkling of the degree to which the East German government penetrated the lives of almost everyone and therefore some idea why the East Germans were so keen to throw off "socialism" (really state capitalism) in 1989.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against apartheid Israel is getting more and more coverage in the media as right wing pundits and politicians - from Andrew Bolt to Kevin Rudd - work themselves up into a lather throwing around accusations of anti-semitism. It was not so different in the early days of the campaign to isolate apartheid South Africa. Nowadays even the most right wing politicians say how much they admire Nelson Mandela. Forty years ago figures such as John Howard were arguing that sanctions against South Africa were a communist plot to bring the country under Soviet control. HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT JOHANNESBURG? (THURSDAY, 1.30PM, SBS1) tells the story of the sporting boycott of South Africa from its earliest days and the shit that *they* had to put up with at that time.

Finally, a double bill on ABC2 on SATURDAY night. Both directed by Stanley Kramer, both featuring Sidney Poitier and both confronting the issue of racism in the United States. THE DEFIANT ONES (1958) at 8.30pm and GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER? (1967) at 10.05pm. Although the latter is by far the better known, the former, about two prisoners, one black (Poitier), one white (Tony Curtis), on the run from jail, is better in my opinion. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is just a bit too stage-y and just too white-bread - the characters are all squeaky clean, the Poitier character most of all. And while Poitier, who plays an upper middle class, Yale-qualified doctor, and his white girlfriend only have to win over her ever-so-liberal middle class parents in the latter film, in The Defiant Ones, the Poitier character is forced to challenge a tough-nut hardcore racist jailbird who in the end makes far more of a sacrifice for the black man than simply giving his daughter's hand in marriage.

Tom's TV picks w/b 31 July

Karl Marx described capitalism as a vampire system, sucking blood from the living. US industrial corporations have done their best to confirm Marx's description. It is nearly 30 years since the Bhopal Disaster in which an explosion at a Union Carbide factory in India killed 4,000 at the time and left a legacy of up to 8,000 deaths in the aftermath. Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson absconded to the US soon after the explosion and has never spent one day in jail for his role in this, the largest massacre of people by a non-nuclear industrial company at a time of peace. Illiterate peasants of Bhopal are now suffering once again at the hands of US multinationals - they have been the innocent subjects of drug testing by US pharmaceutical companies who have given them pills and injected them without their informed consent. DATELINE investigates this scandal on SUNDAY night on SBS1 at 8.30pm.
http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/story/about/id/601291/n/Experimenting-on-India
Shades of Nazi death camp experiments on Jews or the notorious Tuskagee experiments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment).

SBS1 is following this with something else that would be well worth seeing - a half hour documentary unpicking the News International empire in the light of the phone hacking scandal: "MURDOCH: BREAKING THE SPELL?" at 9.30pm on SUNDAY.

Four Corners also digs the dirt on another crime of the US establishment on MONDAY night at 8.30pm (ABC1) - "THE GUANTANAMO TRAP": http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2011/07/29/3280442.htm. As the blurb says, Obama promised to shut the place down: 30 months after his inauguration it's still operating.

This, unfortunately, clashes with part 1 of "COLLISION" (ABC2, MONDAY at 8.30pm), described thus by the TV guide: "A five-part British drama that tells the story of a major road accident and a group of people who have never met, but who all share one single defining moment that will change their lives forever". Having seen it, I'd say it's one of the better drama series of recent years and keeps you guessing right to the end, as the lives of the protagonists are intertwined in many unexpected ways. A reviewer on www.imdb.com comments: "What starts as a straight forward car accident quickly turns into a story full of twists and turns as the police start to dig. [Detective] Tolin unravels a number of mysteries which involve murder, smuggling, whistle blowing and a government cover-up". Record one, watch the other, I'd say!

TUESDAY brings the enjoyable "MOTORCYCLE DIARIES" (2004) at 9.30PM on SBS2, based on the journals of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara as he journeys, as a young man, by motorcycle through South America with his best friend, Alberto Granado. It's an interesting tale that traces Guevara's radicalisation as he travels the continent, witnessing crushing poverty that contrasts so strongly with his own relatively privileged upbringing. It is to Guevara's great credit that he renounced the comforts of bourgeois life to pursue a life of revolution, but the tragedy is that his conception of revolution made no space for the self-activity of the working class who were relegated to the role of passive bystander in the course of the Cuban revolution. Cuba of course does not feature in this film but by the end of it Guevara has clearly marked himself out as a man who conceives of the people as objects to be saved rather than masters of their own destiny.

This is followed straight after by Tony Gatlif's "EXILES" (2004) at 11.40PM on SBS2. I'm a big fan of Gatlif's films - I love the way that in his films he blends wonderful music with cultures and peoples who have been marginalised and who sustain this music. Exiles features a rather unlikeable and self-absorbed couple, both born in Algeria, one to Algerian parents, one to French, but who both now live in France. They decide to travel back to Algeria, much to the initial scepticism of the first who can't understand why anyone would want to go back to such a "backward" country, and to the amazement of Algerians who are making the trip in reverse. It's a road trip with the usual disasters, misunderstandings and so forth. What absolutely makes this film for me, though, is the musical interludes, in particular the amazing final quarter of an hour in which the central female character is transported through a trance-like state brought on by rhythmic drumming and the sounds of a deep bass stringed instrument to some connection with the country and culture of her birth.

Another clash on WEDNESDAY night at 10.05pm. I haven't seen either of these, so bear that in mind! "ASSEMBLY" (2007) on SBS1 tells the story of People's Liberation Army Captain Guzidi who leads 46 men on a sniping mission to defend a vital post during the Chinese war of national liberation against Chiang Kaishek's Nationalist forces. All the men under his command are wiped out, something that is portrayed in pretty bloody detail in the first hour. The second hour shows Captain Guzidi in his fight for justice to restore the honour of the men he led in the face of bureaucratic obstruction.

"ALTIPLANO" (2009) (SBS2 at 10.05pm) has got a mixed reception. It's set in the Peruvian Andes in the mining region. The people suspect that they are being poisoned by mercury from the mine and revolt, barricading the mine. The local surgeon is caught up in the riot as the villagers take their vengeance on the mining company. So we're back where we started with this week's TV picks. Beautifully shot, exquisite music but perhaps rather slow?


Finally, Australia's first ever IRANIAN FILM FESTIVAL kicks off in BRISBANE on THURSDAY and runs through to SUNDAY. Other cities to follow. See for more information:
http://www.sbs.com.au/films/article/single/895191/Iranian-Film-Festival-Australia-2011-Armin-Miladi-interview?cid=23223 AND
http://www.iffa.net.au/

Tom's TV picks w/b 24 July

Ronit Elkabetz

Getting in very early this week - something on SUNDAY, and a major editing job on my forthcoming Marxist Left Review article all weekend ...

I'm guessing that most Australians older than about 30 or 40 got their first exposure to the Native Americans through the Westerns directed by John Ford and others. Ford was in some ways a great director but he, like most in the film industry, had shockingly racist attitudes towards the Native Americans. They were either Noble Savages or else just Savages. The white "settlers" and the US Cavalry were essentially carrying out a civilising mission by driving them off the land. Notably, it took an anti-war movement (Vietnam) to see a new "revisionist" approach to film making about Native Americans, starting with Little Big Man (1970) and Soldier Blue (1970). "REEL INJUN" (ABC2 , SUNDAY at 8.30pm), a Canadian documentary in same genre as "Reel Bad Arabs", tracks how Hollywood has depicted Native Americans since the early silent movies.

MONDAY brings a repeat of "NIN'S BROTHER" (SBS2 at 9pm)  about the death of a young Aboriginal man in South Australia in the 1950s, and also "THE INSECT WOMAN" (1963) (SBS2 at 10.30pm) which might sound like a trash sci-fi film but is actually about the struggle of a poor Japanese woman who escapes from rural poverty only to find yet worse in the big city. This is directed by Shohei Imamura, who also directed "Pigs and Battleships" which I recommended a couple of weeks back and which was quite involving. A reviewer on IMDB writes of the heroine in "The Insect Woman": "Tome's struggles are a metaphor for Japan's wartime struggle. Her rural upbringing represents pre-war Japan, mostly rural and agricultural. Her factory work parallels Japan's call to war and subsequent industrialization. Her work in the Japanese-American household could be related to Japan's service to America during the occupation. Finally, her prostitution is a rather harsh analogy to Japan's selling of service to American might." I guess that involves a few spoilers (!) but might help set the woman's story in the wider context.

TUESDAY brings something likely to make your blood boil. SBS1's "INSIGHT" programme at 7.30pm. Theme this week "MIGRATION BOOM". See a whole bunch of "sophisticated" racists pontificating about "cultural cohesion", Australia's "carrying capacity", "human capital" etc. etc. Keep your shoes close to hand. Also on Tuesday, "JAFFA" (2009) on SBS2 at 9.30pm, a film about a "cross-cultural" romance between an Israeli and a Palestinian, set in the Tel Aviv suburb of the same name. Heavy on the family angst and drama, light on on the broader politics of the situation. But featuring the great Ronit Elkabetz who did a really touching performance in "The Band's Visit" two years previously.

Finally, ABC2 brings a new series of the black comedy "THE THICK OF IT" on THURSDAY at 10.30pm. Whitehall politics unvarnished and unexpurgated.