FREE TO AIR
T20 Big Bash – Grand Final, 7.30pm, Ten
A tricky one, this one, because at the time of writing I have no idea who will be in the final. To take a punt, however, let’s throw four teams into the mix – the Adelaide Strikers, Perth Scorchers, Sydney Sixers and the Melbourne Stars – as they were all sitting in the top four recently. What I can say with absolute authority, however, is that there is tennis on Channel Seven and lots of it. You know what to do.
Human Universe with Brian Cox, 8.30pm, ABC
More than anything else on the box at the moment, this is beautiful, smart and accessible television. I dare you to think of any other show that can take you, in one hour, from a hospital in Manchester to Morocco, Venice, Puerto Rico to the moon and back, and throw in a Return of the Jedi reference and an explanation of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Remarkably, it’s all there in tonight’s episode as Cox explores how humans went from a geo-centric view of the world to the realisation that we are, in fact, one tiny planet in a big black galaxy. Most breathtaking is the vision from Apollo 8 in 1968, as it became the first manned spacecraft to see Earth as a whole planet. Even better, is listening to the astronauts – Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Landers – bicker about taking photos and scrambling to find colour film. Professor Brian Cox has done a remarkable job with this series. He’s made it personal – including using his own baby photos – engaging, funny and moving all at once. Simply brilliant.
Story Club, 10pm, ABC2
Roughly once a week, The Checkout’s Zoe Norton-Lodge and Ben Jenkins host Story Club at the Giant Dwarf theatre in Sydney. The idea is simple: to get a familiar or funny face to sit in a big armchair and tell a hopefully funny story from their life. They have now plonked a camera into the mix and turned it into cheap TV for the ABC. Tonight, the eloquent and funny David Cunningham recounts the inklings that led him to be the ‘‘powerful, unfabulous gay man I am today’’, while Alex Lee, who takes a while to warm up but eventually gets there, describes a disastrous, leech-infested school bushwalk.
Louise Rugendyke
PAY TV
Justified, FX, 8.30pm
This final season is quickly becoming as delicious on the screen as it was in prospect. The showdown between US Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and his old friend and bete noire Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) is looming but there’s a way to go before we get there. What Boyd did to poor old Dewey last week was a timely reminder of what a cold, brutal criminal the silver-tongued charmer really is. But is Boyd cold and brutal enough to kill the love of his life, Ava (Joelle Carter)? Raylan is prepared to wager Ava’s life that he isn’t. Raylan is really putting the squeeze on Ava, forcing her to risk her life to gather evidence against Boyd or go back to jail herself. But with Ava having plenty of cunning and the proven ability to kill this could play out in unexpected ways.
The perfectly cast threesome remains a delight to watch, with Boyd’s charisma matched only by Raylan’s sardonic equanimity. But before they get to grips with each other they have to deal with this season’s new crop of baddies – a bunch whose smarts, stupidity, eccentricity and menace are very much in keeping with the spirit of the late, great Elmore Leonard. Prominent among these is Garret Dillahunt as the leader of a group of Iraq War veterans who have moved into Harlan County intent on intimidating poor hillbillies into selling their houses. As always, the dialogue’s a joy and the plotting as tight as a drum.
MOVIES
Red Dawn (1984), SBS Two, 8.30pm
John Milius was the 1970s Hollywood movie brat who turned to the right, leading to this Hunger Games precursor that imagines a bunch of teenagers from a Colorado town reborn as guerillas when a rampant Soviet Union, backed by a subjugated Latin America, literally invade America. As paranoid fantasies go, Red Dawn is full of potent imagery – the Russians turn the local drive-in cinema into a re-education camp and open a Soviet-American Friendship Centre to indoctrinate local youth before the teenage guerillas destroy it. The dialogue alludes to the desensitisation of the young soldiers, but the film exults in their victories and is excited by their brutality – C. Thomas Howell executes a traitor and Lea Thompson literally blows herself up to take out more communists, while as the group’s leader, Patrick Swayze, does his best John Wayne impression before sacrificing himself. Given that in the real 1989 the Soviet Union actually collapsed, Milius and his fellow Reaganites may have been a touch pessimistic.
Reservoir Dogs (1992), Thriller Movies (pay TV), 8.30pm
Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 debut remains a nourishing slice of LA pulp, revealing the writer/director’s eye for a fluid, folding narrative as the story documents the before and after of a failed but unseen robbery, with the easy camaraderie of the codenamed hoods – including Harvey Keitel’s Mr White and Tim Roth’s Mr Orange – before the job being replaced by paranoia and mistrust after they are set up. Tarantino’s debts are obvious, from lifting the plot of Ringo Lam’s 1987 Hong Kong thriller City On Fire to the stylistic nods to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, but Reservoir Dogs is more than the sum of its parts thanks to his intuitive ear for dialogue. The movie is a study of masculinity, providing an authentic working class milieu where a man is defined by two things – how he tells a story and his capacity for violence. As the plot unfolds you realise that Tarantino has allowed one to literally bleed into the other.
Craig Mathieson
