It would be glib to note ABC managing director Hugh Marks’ response to the Race Around The World-Gina Rinehart fracas is the funniest thing the ABC has produced for some time. But it is, primarily because the ABC hasn’t been producing funny things.
For those who came in late, this is just another episode of the show we always give way to much attention to, Stupid People Say Stupid Things. The stupid person in this instance was a Race Around The World (RATW) contestant who spoke of impaling Gina Rinehart and making her innards a sausage roll or somesuch.
see no sausage roll, hear no sausage roll
This is definitely not a Rinehart thing although anyone with a pulse would know you say something about her in public and her team will know about it. She has a better media monitoring system than most government departments.
That said, this was just a very bad joke by a very loose Race Around The World contestant who was desperately trying to give some street edge to her otherwise tedious Wes Anderson aesthetic. It’s RATW so we’re not expecting adult conversations but it’s fair to say we’re not expecting lame attempted jokes inciting violence against women either.
Predictably, media of the right have decried the wrongness of it all and the left are bemoaning the death of satire on the ABC. As if the ABC has really done satire since Micallef bailed for unfocused ob-docs.
Should the ABC get out of comedy? Depends what day you ask me and what I’ve just watched but generally, of course not. Particularly when the other stations - and streaming services, other than Stan - aren’t doing Australian sketch or narrative comedy.
Sami Shah in Crikey made me laugh, for the wrong reasons, with his missive that Aunty should get out of the entertainment business altogether.
Shah obviously has a horse in this race, having been sacked from the plum role of 3LO Breakfast host in Melbourne for, well, just not being a very good broadcaster. That’s ok, he’s an ok comedian. But what an over-reaching argument.
Again, the ABC has ballsed its communications up. Its response should not have been from Marks saying, in a ham-fisted response, no one will be subject to something that is “violent in its description”, whatever that means. What an awful committee-generated phrase. Someone should have been wrapped on the knuckles, disciplined or taken an enforceable undertaking to do the kind of training ARN made Kyle Sandilands do repeatedly. They should have admitted it was a production failing by one or more producers to let it through either on the grounds of, primarily, taste, and secondly, humour.
But what would the ABC know about humour? Currently it has no comedy on air, as far as I can see, and the most recent effort, the tired Bad Company, a vehicle for Anne Edmonds, was weak. I mean, good on the ABC for gutting its Arts division and staff and then making a bog obvious comedy about how pissy arts companies are. That’s funny.
btw
This Spider-Man: Brand New Day thing is getting crazy. As of Thursday, it’s earned $60 million at the Australian box office in TWO WEEKS. It’s the 11th biggest film of all time in Australia in TWO WEEKS.
And The Odyssey isn’t far behind. Its $49.2 million has it in the top 25 of all time and it should get near the top 10 (Nolan’s The Dark Knight earned $46 million in 2008). We’ll keep tracking them but they’re not sucking the life from cinemas. Even the baby boomer mediocrity from New Zealand, Holy Days, earned half a mill in its first week.
btw
The Daily Show is celebrating its 30th anniversary with an inconsistent batch of vodcasts/podcasts. This one, with Ronny Chieng and Jordan Klepper is great (the Josh Johnson and Grace Kuhlenschmidt one is not so great). Firstly, Ronny talks about how he, like many of us, strained to see The Daily Show in Australia in the early days when he was a student at Melbourne Uni. But secondly, they include a little piece from 1998 about a Disney Adult that somehow, I’d never seen. If you watch nothing else this weekend, other than My Brilliant Career, make it this. The embed below isn’t working this week, so go here and cue to 24 minutes.
This week’s films
The End of Oak Street (three stars, maybe and a half, not sure)
this appears to be the end of Oak Street
What an unexpected delight. I haven’t been in a cinema that’s had so much fun for some time, even though David Robert Mitchell’s dinosaurs-in-the-suburbs malarkey takes a little time to heat up. But when it does, it has a rollicking last half hour or so in which a few cinematic risks are taken, and rewarded, logic flies out the door, and you feel like you’re back in a 1980s cinema just having a wow of a time. In the Year of Our Anne - in which she’s loaded up Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey and soon, Verity - she becomes the focus and anchor of the movie in which an 80s nuclear family are thrown into the wackiest of worlds. The director of It Follows delivers a wacky, entertaining but flawed film, with some bland dialogue and an oddly misfiring performance from Ewan McGregor. But it’s not a film demanding intense scrutiny. It’s just a very competent popcorn movie. Full review in the Financial Review here.
One Night Only (unreviewed)
Dua Lipa’s husband, Callum Turner, stars in a romcom directed by Will Gluck (Peter Rabbit, Anyone But You). Also starring Monica Barbaro, this wasn’t screened to this critic at least, and has earned tepid reviews in the US.
Tom & Jerry: Forbidden Compass (unreviewed)
The Hanna-Barbera animated staple return in a film made by a Chinese production company and dubbed into English. Apparently the US-China co-production incorporates Chinese themes. What is going on here?
Stop! That! Train! (unreviewed)
An action comedy starring RuPaul and a host of drag performers. I know nothing.
and the best film currently in cinemas?
The Odyssey
Tour announces
The Meredith festival line-up doesn’t do it for me this year: Dijon, Fcukers, The Dandy Warhols, Killing Heidi, underscores, DJ Seinfeld, Eddy Current Suppression Ring et al. The only ones that do it for me are Fat Dog and Hiatus Kaiyote.
The Sydney Opera House has announced Dizzie Rascal, Wolf Alice and James Blake will play the Forecourt in December. On consecutive nights
The Good Things festival in December will feature Limp Bizkit, Simple Plan, Millencollin, Grinspoon and Bad Religion, among other, fwiw.
Suzi Quatro is back soon.
Men at Work will tour now until November.
The Saints 73-78, including original members of The Saints, Ed Kuepper and Ivor Hay, along with Mick Harvey, Peter Oxley and Mark Arm will tour from January, and release a brand-new live album, recorded by the original Saints in 1976.
Did we know Swervedriver are touring next month?
UK stand-up Kevin Bridges is doing big rooms in March.
...and a book
A niche memoir of a very particular era and seminal chapter in Mark Ronson’s musical life, the period where a white teen in New York mixed with hip hop royalty on the way to becoming one of the hottest DJs on the planet. Stops short of his music production era, during which he’s knocked out a number of bangers including Uptown Funk, other than mentioning his first real hit, producing for adopted Aussie, Nikka Costa.
You really have to love or know your 90s black music or have designs on being a DJ to get into this. But it is incredibly instructional. And I liked how he acknowledges, repeatedly, the absurdity of his nepo-baby advantages (his stepdad was the lead of Foreigner and his parents were showbiz party royalty). For all the privilege, he seems level-headed and likeable.