FREE TO AIR
Is Your Brain Male or Female?, SBS One, 7.30pm
It’s always controversial, the old nature/nurture debate about whether girls pop out of the womb just gagging to play with babies and toy ironing boards while boys want trucks and things that go bang. Alternatively, are we all sad social constructs following subliminal rules? Electrodes and advances in neuroscience – stop me if I’m getting too technical – means the dinner party debate is now examinable in a rigorous scientific manner, although don’t go expecting too much in the way of concrete answers from this Horizon production. Women’s and men’s brains do appear to be wired differently in certain respects, but that could be gender roles messing with neural plasticity. A potentially tough-going subject is leavened by the easy-breezy manner of Dr Michael Mosley and Professor Alice Roberts, two telegenic English boffins who manage not to be overly obnoxious while following the battle of the sexes narrative.
Revenge, Seven, 9pm
The really great thing about Revenge is that there’s so much revenge in it. It’s chock-full of the stuff. A whole hour of pretty people conniving, bitching, scheming and cracking out the instruments of torture – but not before putting down plastic to stop any nasty bloodstains spoiling the furniture. See? Revenge proves that revenge can be practical, as well as satisfying. And if the doorbell rings in the middle of that torture session, just be sure to fix your hair before answering. It might be a handsome young man come to ask you out on a date.
Elementary, Ten, 9.30pm
It’s Jonny Lee Miller as a tortured modern-day Sherlock who provides the still centre of Elementary, the calm eye of the storm around which all the action swirls. He’s great – surprisingly great – in a role that seemed improbable at first. If you can forgive the casting of Lucy Liu as Watson – yeah, OK, it sort of works – it’ll be a doddle to overcome the now-cliched brand of Rain Man observational eccentricities that have been put to use in other television series (hello, The Mentalist). Praise be indeed they’re underplayed for a focus on the recovering addict’s precarious emotional state, which is less sentimental than the crime he and his Asian-American princess sidekick solve this week.
Larissa Dubecki
PAY TV
StarTalk: George Takei, National Geographic, 9.30pm
The prospect of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson getting George Takei on to his new talk show is enticing; the reality isn’t quite what it could have been. The interview was pre-recorded, so we see chunks of it in between other chunks of Tyson, comedian Leighann Lord and astrophysicist Charles Liu chatting about it in on the show proper. As always, Takei has plenty of amusing anecdotes about Star Trek and plenty of poignant ones about the ordeal he and his family endured during and after their internment during World War II. Back in the studio the conversation ranges from the evolutionary roots of racism to the fact you can improve wine by aerating it in a blender.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
A Dangerous Method (2011), SBS 2, 10.20pm
David Cronenburg’s A Dangerous Method, scripted by Christopher Hampton from his play The Talking Cure, examines the birth of modern psychiatry in Europe. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) – aided by his searingly bright patient, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) – and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) are passionately locking horns, while also inspiring each other to ever-more-far-reaching theories. The scenes with Jung and Freud may be the dramatic high-points of this fascinating and often unsettling film, but it is the brilliant and complex characterisation of Sabina, and Knightley’s fearless performance, that stay longest in the mind.
Two-Lane Blacktop, (1971) ABC, 1.25am (Tuesday)
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the young employed various expressions to cope – or simply defy – the changing world around them. The odd mainstream film, and pretty well every counter-cultural effort, provided some inspiration with their iconic expressions of rebellion and despair. Cool Hand Luke (1967) gave us ‘‘What we’ve got here is ... failure to communicate’’, while Midnight Cowboy (1969) offered, ‘‘Hey, I’m walking here! I’m walking here!’’ – one of the most exhilarating moments of on-screen defiance. As for Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), it has several gems, including ‘‘Everybody has to kill their own snakes’’ and ‘‘You are out of your f…. tree.’’ One used to hear the first (usually meant kindly) when a mate had an issue to deal with and the second when someone had done something seriously unacceptable (like defend Sir John Kerr). Two-Lane Blacktop is a modernist ‘‘western’’ from director Monte Hellman (whose two preceding films were Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting).
The Driver (singer James Taylor) and The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) are travelling across America challenging locals not to gunfights, but drag races on outback roads. The process is simple: insult a stranger’s hot rod, get challenged to a duel and settle on a wager. These New Age hustlers are joined along their route to nowhere by a sexually free-spirited The Girl (Laurie Bird) and a gay Oklahoma Hitchhiker (Harry Dean Stanton). The film ends in a way that ‘‘blew’’ people’s minds decades ago and still surprises today. Two-Lane Blacktop may sound terrible, but it’s actually a languid, improvised classic, a time capsule of an era only hipsters want to revisit. The film captures the period’s visual ugliness (Mission Brown was the colour of choice), bizarre ways of speaking (‘‘at’’ was added to countless sentences, such as the petrol-station attendant’s ‘‘Where’s your gas tank at?’’) and an existential detachment that unexpectedly bursts into anger orhope.
Scott Murray
