FREE TO AIR
Maximum Choppage, ABC2, 9pm
This is the second run out for Lawrence Leung’s amiable, if slightly odd, comedy. If you missed part one, the set-up is that Leung’s character, Simon Chan, has just returned home to Cabramatta after a stint at Marshalls Art School in Melbourne, where he has become a dab hand at pastel drawing and video installation. However, all the locals believe he is now a great warrior who has been attending Martial Arts School. Everything proceeds from this almost Gilbert and Sullivan-esque misunderstanding as lily-livered Simon is expected to clean up the gang-ridden streets of Cabramatta with his non-existent fighting skills. There are some nice moments among the top-drawer cast. Darren Gilshenan is great playing the scheming Mayor Crawford as a ridiculous pantomime villain type, and Leung himself does a fine job as the hapless Simon. With plenty of cheesy martial arts movie moments and a storyline in which pirate DVDs are used as a proxy for street drugs, the world the characters inhabit is deliberately cartoonish and whacked-out. Sometimes this works from a comedic point of view and at other times it’s just a bit strange.
Ebola Frontline, ABC, 9.30pm
This almost unbearably emotional BBC documentary does more to encapsulate the human toll and the sheer capricious cruelty of the Ebola epidemic than a thousand news reports could ever do. It focuses on a heroic London doctor, Javid Abdelmoneim, who volunteers to work at an Ebola treatment centre in Sierra Leone. Much of the footage comes from a camera he wears as he works in the tent housing the confirmed Ebola victims. UNICEF estimates that some 10,000 children have lost one or both parents in the crisis, creating a massive humanitarian disaster for West Africa. Occasionally, the program addresses the response of Western governments, including our own. It is hard not to conclude that there’s racism at work when you compare the West’s inadequate response with the hysteria when a few white people were infected.
Family Guy, 7mate, 9pm
Sly pop culture references. Off-colour cracks. Sharp commentary on modern manners from a talking baby and his sidekick dog. What’s not to like in what is another classic ep? Best moment: when Peter rips his ears off after hearing Meg has been chosen to be a model.
Nick Galvin
PAY TV
Camp X: Secret Agent School, History, 8.30pm
The second half of a compelling documentary about Camp X, the Canadian military base that served as Allies’ spy and saboteur-training centre during World War II. The most gripping parts are the old spies’ accounts of their daring operations behind enemy lines in occupied Europe. Greek-American spy Helias Doundoulakis recalls how he narrowly evaded capture and torture by freezing half-way up a wall while German officers spent hours playing cards underneath him. He escaped to call in an air strike on a troop train, killing 2500 German soldiers. Eye-opening.
Euros of Hollywood, Arena, 9.30pm
Italian sweetie-pie Massimo moved all the way to Los Angeles to try to break into American movies. Now that he’s been cast in one he has to fly all the way to Romania to shoot it. But he’s giddy with gratitude and joy, and he couldn’t care less that the flick is a direct-to-video cheapie. He’s playing a Russian thug, and while a couple of hours with a dialect coach won’t get his accent anywhere near perfect he will at least get to show what he learned from all those lessons in pretending to be strangled. The delightful Massimo is now pretty much the only thing keeping this reality series watchable – the vanities and dramas of the other ‘‘Euros’’ are quickly wearing thin.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Dead Calm (1989), Thriller Movies (pay TV), 8.30pm
Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm is a taut and attractive thriller about a husband (Sam Neill) and wife (Nicole Kidman) who attempt to overcome a family tragedy by sailing around the Pacific in their yacht. One day, they come across a mysterious man (Billy Zane) whose boat is sinking and all his passengers are dead. Based on the novel by Charles Williams that Orson Welles had filmed in 1963 as The Deep (and now lost), Noyce’s re-interpretation proved a triumph for himself and Kidman, and their Hollywood careers quickly flourished. It also strengthened the international reputation of Sydney production company Kennedy Miller (now Kennedy Miller Mitchell). And so to an anecdote: I was in LA in late 1988 helping co-ordinate a forum on Australian cinema at UCLA, along with such charming and erudite Kennedy Miller luminaries as writer-directors George Miller, Phil Noyce and John Duigan, scriptwriter Terry Hayes and actress Nicole Kidman. One night, we went deep into the Valley to a test screening of Dead Calm, where I sat next to one of the head execs at Warner Bros in the balcony. We had a fabulous view of the young audience below, all of whom left at some stage (many repeatedly) to buy popcorn, visit the loo or who knows what. When Dead Calm was over, I praised the Man from Warner Bros. on how well the screening had gone, before adding in half-jest: ‘‘Now I know why so many Hollywood movies have characters who every half-hour or so explain what’s happened up to that point. It’s so all those who have temporarily exited the cinema aren’t left behind.’’ The Man from Warner Bros looked at me as if were not the brightest kid in class and replied, ‘‘Yes, of course’’. So, now you know.
Evolution (2001), Eleven, 9.30pm
A comedy starring David Duchovny and Julianne Moore about pesky alien organisms taking over our planet, Evolution is a minor-key effort from Ivan Reitman, director of Ghostbusters.
Scott Murray
