It's Sex And Dieting For Lunch, Cops And Bloggers For Dinner
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday September 4, 2008
LOVE SICK: SECRETS OF A SEX ADDICT (2008), noon, Seven: If you believe the title suggests a lunchtime cavalcade of torrid sexual encounters and continuous legover activity - writ large, nude and explicit - forget it. Packaging is all too frequently deceptive; so too is unpackaging, as in striptease. This film, based on Sue William Silverman's memoir of her struggle with - and eventual victory over - sexual addiction, might be vaguely informative but it's far from full-frontal. Similar addictive nightmares on Nine in ...
HUNGER POINT (2003) noon, Nine: Viewers settling down to a sumptuous luncheon of wafers and low-cal squid urine in pursuit of weight loss, might draw some sustenance from this tragedy involving a domineering mother's determination to keep her teenage daughters sylphlike. Marsha Hunter (Barbara Hershey in an awful wig) insists Frannie and Shelly (Susan May Pratt and Christina Hendricks), conform to an archetype conjured by her own vanity and inadequacy. She's done the Valium thing and, in futile pursuit of physical perfection, drives Frannie to anorexia with her whining and pathetic notions. "It's hard to feel normal when you're trying to be perfect" says the film's teaser. This is strictly by-the-numbers angst, hot off the same assembly line as those weight-reducing biscuits that taste like a cardboard suitcase and make you feel replete when you're not.CATALYST 8pm, ABC1: How's your body clock? Running smoothly or hopelessly out of timetable order like a 200 bus from Bondi Junction to Chatswood? Jet lag is the most obvious manifestation of interruptions to our circadian rhythm but there are other aspects of time and ritual that impact on our sense of synchronicity with the world around us. "Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells ..." as Edgar Allan Poe noted with poetic finesse. Is Jonica Newby running later than the March hare? Did the Mad Hatter destroy time - or was it T.S. Eliot?THE STRIP 8.30pm, Nine: Deja vu is the sense or illusion of having previously experienced something which is actually being encountered for the first time. The debut of this new cop show, set in the glittering neon suckhole of Surfers Parvovirus, will probably trigger mass outbreaks of that "been there, done that, kiss-me-goodnight-sergeant-major" feeling. New in name only, The Strip follows the activities of some dentally magnificent Gold Coast cops as they go about their business while dealing with a multitude of personal problems blighting their existence. Frankie J. Holden has put away his Underbelly shortbreads but maintains a tight unit with familiar rigour as his team gets cracking solving a homicide. A girl, flirting with a window cleaner in her high-rise apartment, is aghast when the chap descends abruptly to his death, triggering an investigation into the activities of a stroppy local surfing identity (Harold Hopkins), his much younger girlfriend and his son. This is rigidly stock-standard from the red herrings to the bleeding obvious and the faux glamour leavened by deadpan Aussie larrikinism. The colours are bright, the editing snappy and the intercutting of scenery to sustain momentum between scenes not unfamiliar. Miami Vice down under? Nope. It's better than that - and glossier than Shark's Paradise which screened on Nine about 20 years ago. But it's nowhere near good enough, particularly in the wake of Underbelly and cop shows with genuine sinew, intellect and aspiration. Aaron Jeffery and Vanessa Gray as Cross and Tully, the headliners of the squad, are the equal of anyone on CSI Miami but that's hardly reassuring. Perhaps a glamorous forensic series, CSIRO Miami, might be a thought?RADIOTHE MEDIA REPORT 8.30am & 8pm, Radio National: If newspapers are committing suicide by proxy, is blogging the replacement mode of information transmission? Antony Loewenstein's book The Blogging Revolution discusses user-generated news and the transitions confronting notions of identity and community. So little to say, so many ways of saying it.
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald
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