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The Block Triple Threat, Nine, 7.30pm
Tonight the renovators are getting stuck into building their ‘‘luxe’’ bedrooms and walk-in wardrobes ‘‘that will be the envy of all women’’. Ugh, really? Who writes this voiceover? Perhaps the waffle is written to seamlessly blend inwith the building’s 1970s construction date. In between the vapid voiceovers is more vapidity. Tim and Anastasia have aday off at the zoo with their kids, Josh and Charlotte have endless discussions about the difference between beams and trusses, and Josh and Aiden play a ‘‘prank’’ on Keith.
Hipsters, SBS Two, 8.30pm
If the hipster beard backlash hasn’t already started, then this new series might well get things rolling. Nothing spells the death of something hip like mainstream examination, and this six-part series, fronted by Samuel Johnson, aims to trace the roots of the ‘‘defining style of the last decade’’ – hipsterism. He starts his journey in Fitzroy, Melbourne’s hipster ground zero, beginning with an almost too-cleverly ‘‘ironic’’ pastiche of bearded, man-bun-wearing dudes sipping artisanal coffee in alleyways. Johnson travels to the United States, Asia and Britain to ‘‘study hipsters in their natural habitat’’, but not one of his interviewees admits to being a hipster. Tonight he tries to channel his inner hipster by improving his wardrobe, meeting style and culture ‘‘experts’’, and even getting a tattoo – only on his hip, though, so he’ll never get a job as a barista. Johnson is a witty host, but it’s hard to take Hipsters too seriously. It’s stylishly shot, fun and silly, quite like hipsterism itself.
How to Get Away with Murder, Seven, 9pm
If you’ve been getting whiplash from the breakneck flashing forwards and backwards in Shonda Rhimes’ How to Get Away with Murder, tonight the pain starts to pay off. We’re finally getting close to the murder. As Annalise (Viola Davis) and her student gang get stuck into Rebecca’s (Katie Findlay) case, we see Rebecca and Wes (Alfred Enoch) in a flash forward, sharing an intimate kiss and a serious case of blood spatter. In the present day, a gag order is issued on Rebecca’s case, so naturally Annalise finds a way of bending the rules and defying it. There are some big reveals and still time, of course, for Connor (Jack Falahee) to fit in a steamy sex scene.
Kylie Northover
PAY TV
Catfish: The TV Show, MTV, 8.30pm
You’d think that after three seasons of Catfish people would have worked out how to do their own reverse image searches. Evidently not. Then again, maybe it’s just the ingrained American desire to be on TV that sends them running to Nev Schulman when they suspect that their online sweethearts aren’t really who they say they are. This season Schulman’s partner in sleuthing, Max Joseph, is off directing a movie, so Schulman is working with a bunch of fill-ins. The first, MTV ‘‘personality’’ Charlamagne – yes, he spells it with an extra ‘‘A’’ – has none of the sensitivity required. For one thing, he repeatedly refers to sex as ‘‘smashing a chick’’. In any case, the two of them are off to Milwaukee, where 26-year-old Miracle has begun to have suspicions about her boyfriend, who she has never met and who refuses even to Skype with her. What Schulman eventually uncovers is an affecting situation arising out of loneliness and oppressive religion.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Tombstone (1993), Action Movies (pay TV), 6.15pm
A teenage prodigy who studied theatre at Juilliard in New York, Val Kilmer’s wide, cocky smile and chiseled contours made him a natural for movies – he had a beautifully glib Californian face. But his lead roles were inevitably failures – see Batman Forever, The Doors, and The Saint – while his ensemble work was often fascinating. The apotheosis of this was his appearance in Tombstone, playing gunfighter Doc Holliday in another version of the O.K. Corral story for workmanlike director George P. Cosmatos. Rail-thin as he slowly wastes away from tuberculosis, Kilmer’s Holliday exists in a different film to Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp, Bill Paxton Morgan Earp and the rest of the actors who play at being lawmen and cowboys in this standard Wild West fare. Feeling his mortality but unable to put aside his vices, Holliday is self-aware and philosophical disrupting the conventional morality that is celebrated in the rest of a movie. And he carries it all to the character’s final breath.
Girl, Interrupted (1999), Eleven, 9.30pm
Adapted from Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir covering her stint in an upmarket mental institution for young ladies at the end of the 1960s, Girl, Interrupted was not a great film but it marked the end of multiple eras on screen and off. Winona Ryder, a decade older than the 18-year-old Susanna, was the project’s headline star, but her vulnerability and fickle self-absorption was no match for the fizzing attitude of Angelina Jolie’s Lisa, the ward sociopath whose emotional upheavals and sexually antagonistic antics come to dominate James Mangold’s film. The film is soaked in predictable period music and low-level stakes, a nostalgic reflection of an introspective post-Cold War American decade that was about to be swept away by George W. Bush, 9/11, and Ben Bernanke’s housing bubble. Jolie won an Academy Award for best supporting actress, Ryder’s career started to flame out, Mangold moved towards action movies, and nobody thought to give Vanessa Redgrave, as a psychiatrist, a worthwhile scene.
Page One: Inside The New York Times (2011), stan.com.au
While the institutional circumstances have somewhat changed in this portrait of The New York Times, Andrew Rossi’s documentary remains a bracing introduction to David Carr, the paper’s esteemed media columnist who passed away in the newsroom six weeks ago. Carrying himself with a tilted head and a voice marked by former addiction, Carr had an analyst’s eye but worked his beat with old-fashioned perseverance; the moment where he corrects some self-impressed Vice staffers is priceless.
Craig Mathieson