By Jonathan Scutt 8/9/08
I’m still waiting to find out when my FAMOUS FOR 15 METERS! doco will go to air. Another show I worked on called THE RED ROOM is supposed to air tonight at 9:30 right after local knowledge. I suspect I won’t be getting my name in the credits for 2 shows in a row just yet! None of my video appeared in the RMITV Uplate 08 telethon so I won’t be giving them any free plugs.! (I could bitch about what a technical disaster the show was but I won’t).
I am also disgruntled to learn that CBS are still making episodes of ‘Big Bang Theory’ & are currently up to episode 17. Channel 9 canned the show after only a handful of episodes! The show is made by the same people who make ‘Two & a Half Men’ which sometimes has 3 episodes on the same day! Yet ‘Big Bang’ must be too intellectual for the channel 9 audience. Smutty innuendoes about oral sex are obviously more to their liking. Mind you I love a good smutty innuendo as much as the next dirty minded pervert, but I prefer them to be tempered with some intellectual humor!
by Jonathan Scutt 26/8/08
Well thank god the Olympics are over & I can have my TV back! I rarely watch Channel 7 but I watch a lot of SBS, so it will be nice to have that back. But there are ominous warnings that Channel 2 will be showing the Paralymics so I hope that won’t effect ‘Spicks & Specks’. I need my twice weekly fix of Myf Warhurst!
But for a brief moment the green guide advertised my beloved ‘Big Bang Theory’ returning to Channel 9 in place of ‘Two & a half Men’. I got all excited only to discover that it was in fact ‘Til Death’ that appeared. I keep looking for the DVD in the stores but I don’t think it has been released yet. Where are my nerdy knights in knitted cardigans?
The new season of ‘Local Knowledge’ has started on channel 31 but still no word on if or when my ‘Famous for 15 Meters!’ will be shown.
by Jonathan Scutt 26/7/08
I finally went to see the new Get Smart film with a hint of fear & trepidation. (Hint of Fear is now available in the 200 ml bottle). I have mixed feelings about the results. It was a good film but it felt more like a new Austin Powers movie than Get Smart. Sometimes the only similarities were the names & the occasional catch phrases.
It’s one thing to update the setting & the characters etc but Maxwell Smart was always supposed to be a bumbling idiot, he was never good at research! Anne Hathaway’s 99 was a lot more independent & a lot less adoring of Max than the original. And as far as I am concerned the only person who could ever replace Edward Platt as the Chief is David Ketchum who played Agent 13 hiding in clocks or wall safes etc.
I didn’t enjoy Terence Stamp as Siegfried, especially when the real Siegfried (Bernie Kopell) made a cameo appearance. That’s like rubbing salt into the wound. (Hmm an interesting catch phrase. I must remember to coin that sometime.) Obviously they wanted their villains to be more menacing than in the original. Ironically Austin Power’s Dr Evil was more like Siegfried than this new version. The action scenes have certainly been ramped up especially the train scenes around Terminal Island & along the Los Angeles River.
The names Starker & Larabee however, seem to be there to incriminate the innocent rather than as faithful reproductions of the original characters. The original Larabee, played by Don Adams’ cousin Robert Karvalas was certainly bumbling but never malicious as the new character seems to be. The new Starker is similar to King Moody’s character but lacks the same level of humor that King Moody gave to his performance. The same goes for Patrick Warburton who played his character all wrong. (I won’t give it away in case you haven’t seen the film). The original actor played this character brilliantly & trying to fill the shows of such an iconic character is no mean feet.
All in all I feel they have created a very good ‘new’ spy comedy somewhere between Get Smart & Austin Powers rather than a new version of an original idea. If all the names had been changes & I had gone into this movie will no knowledge of it I can say for sure that I wouldn’t have even guessed it was based on Get Smart. I would have enjoyed it though. I probably would have enjoyed it more if they had changed all the names & pretended it was a completely new concept.
I’ll finish by lamenting that Rowan Atkinson’s ‘Johnny English’ was a one off movie & not a trilogy or a television series. I would love to see Rowan & his sidekick Bough (played by Ben Miller) every week on television. They made for a brilliant English version of Max & 99 & had so much potential to keep going.
What a pity our TV screens are instead filled with reality shows about dancing, singing, weight loss or stupid dating game shows! Thank god Big Brother is finally dead, (except of course for the Big Brother theme park which will no doubt appear shortly, if it hasn’t already!)
Shared on
by Jonathan Scutt 25/7/08
It’s nice to see ‘Frontline’ back again on our screens. This time however they are attacking not the media but the politicians in the guise of ‘The Hollow Men’. It is satirizing politicians or public servants or both? Is it a story about how public servants manipulate politics or how they are driven by their political masters? This program seems to be a variation on ‘Yes Prime Minister’ with all the actual politicians skillfully removed from the screen.
The really weird thing is that this series was written during the Coalition government so is based around John Howard’s policies. However it resonates very well with the Rudd government. How ironic that as soon as they run a story about appointing a new ambassador, the real Prime Minister Kevin Rudd appoints a real ambassador, Tim Fischer to the Vatican. (Did he get the idea from watching ‘The Hollow Men’ or was he just trying to upstage the pope?) A news report that featured ‘The Hollow Men’ in their story about the new ambassador was very apt.
Why the tax payers should be paying for Tim Fischer to be an ambassador to such a tiny piece of land I don’t know. I think Tim would better serve Australians by staying home & telling Kevin Rudd how to fix the railways. He’s just written a report on rail freight for the Victorian government so he knows what he’s talking about. (Possibly this is why Kevin is sending him overseas. He knows too much!)
But leaving my total contempt for Kevin Rudd to one side, it’s nice to see the Rob, & Santo & co back making satirical black comedy. The inclusion of the yummy Nicola Parry was very welcome. I soon grew tired of ‘The Panel’ & the way it often rambled on about nothing in particular. Don’t even get me started on my contempt for Kate Langbroek!
I did enjoy ‘Thank God You’re Here’ & I hope it might make a come back in the same way ‘Good News Week’ has. (Is that a come back or a re-hash?)
But the final irony is that Rob Sitch seems to be reprising his role of clueless Frontline host Mike Moore. Another irony is that this new black comedy could have combined ‘Frontline’ with ‘The Hollow Men’ by making it about Mike Moore becoming Labor’s newest high profile candidate. Remember when they tried to put sports reporter Angela Pippos in a safe Labor seat? (Yes she does have a degree in political science but they just want a familiar face who looks good on TV. Somebody really needs to make a comedy about that! Maybe I’ll do it myself. I’m sure there’s room in my ‘Mind Patrol’ comedy for even more political satire.
Shared on
By Jonathan Scutt 7/6/08
Well here I am going on about how Laura Marano from ‘Back to You’ will probably grow up to be as hot as Madeleine Zima, & she disappears! Maybe she saw Madeleine Zima in ‘Californication’ & said: “Mummy I don’t want to grow up to be a slut!”
Anyway the really stupid part is that now Chuck finally gets to tell his daughter he is her father, it’s a completely different girl. Continuity goes out the window, of the Eureka Tower observation deck!
It’s especially bad because the new girl (what ever her name is) looks very different & hardly has 2 lines with Kelsey Grammer before the big revelation is made. Let this be a lesson to you all, never leave people on a cliff hanger unless you’ve got everybody signed up to do the next episode!
Shared on
Add Comments
