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Cats Uncovered, SBS, 7.30pm
It was inevitable given the success of Seven’s collection of YouTube clips Cats Will Make You LOL, that similar series would follow. This at least takes a different path to show us more about the popular pet with actual scientists and camera operators capturing beautifully detailed slow-motion, night-vision and assorted other candid footage to show how cats interpret the world around them. Surprisingly, it’s fascinating stuff and shows how close your average moggie is to the big cats roaming jungles. You’ll never look at Puss the same way again.
Humans, ABC2, 8.30pm
The premise here for those who came in late (actually if you’re coming in late, forget it, this is the season finale, so head to iView and start at the beginning) is in the very-near future life-like robots will be integrated into society to help us out in various ways. They’re so close to human however, that the lines have started to blur and many are starting to wonder if this isn’t in fact the next step in evolution andwhat does it really mean to behuman after all? Insert nasty government types, an underground plot and the inevitable human/synth romance and you’ve got an above average science fiction adventure that poses some genuine questions.
What Really Happens in Thailand, Seven, 9pm
Having endured the cringe-worthy What Really Happens In Bali last year, it was with gritted teeth I hit “play” on this sequel. But, while the cliche of binge-drinking bogans throwing down cocktails to dance like a gibbon on an ant nest while screaming “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!” is still there, thankfully we’ve also got a lot of interesting and inspiring people in the mix. There’s the incredibly likeable Lucchiari family, who have moved to Phuket to study Muay Thai kick boxing, Nadine, who is there for surgery to change from male to female, and 71-year-old expat Wal Brown, who patrols the bar district every night leading a volunteer ‘‘tourist police” force to keep the visitors safe from themselves. “We try [to help them] and we do a pretty good job,” he says. It’s a thankless task. Most tourists seem more intent on ignoring his good advice, but a few more like Wal would help go a long way to repairing the damage done by the drunks.
Scott Ellis
PAY TV
Wahlburgers, Arena, 9.30pm
Only the most ardent fans of Mark and Donnie Wahlberg will be able to muster up much enthusiasm for the return of this dreary reality show. Tonight most of the action takes place in Los Angeles. Chef Paul Wahlberg, the man behind the Wahlburgers burger restaurant, has brought his kids out from Boston to visit his little brother Mark. Paul and the kids check out Mark’s star on the Walk of Fame before heading back to the mansion for a spot of swimming and a barbecue. There’s some build-up about Mark cooking for his brother for the first time in their lives, only for Mark to reveal that he’s hired a gourmet chef instead. Laugh? You probably won’t.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, (1988) Family Movies (pay TV), 5.45pm
Like Roman Polanski’s 1974 masterpiece Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is about the corruption required to make Los Angeles into a modern city – in the former it’s the looting of water rights that’s required, in the latter it is land for a metropolis-shaping freeway. Of course, the protagonists are somewhat different: set in a version of 1947 Hollywood where cartoon characters live and work in the madcap Toontown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit mixes noir archetypes and a Looney Tunes sensibility. From the opening scene, where a vintage cartoon is revealed to be a scene on a movie set and the cartoon characters are just another type of actor (primarily temperamental), the picture makes the most of a knockout concept. The special effects required to insert animated characters into live action scenes now look positively primitive, but there’s too much going on for such concerns to take hold.
In one nightclub scene Daffy Duck and Donald Duck share the stage (a first after 50 years of corporate division), while the fictional Roger Rabbit, a middling star from a series of shorts, is a frenetic presence designed to annoy private investigator Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), who has had it in for toons since one killed his brother by dropping a piano on his head. Kathleen Turner memorably vamped up Jessica Rabbit, but Robert Zemeckis’ delightful hybrid, complete with voices by Mel Blanc, also connected the golden era of American animation to a revived future.
Frances Ha (2012) SBS2, 8.30pm
The creative partnership of filmmaker Noah Baumbach and actress and sometimes co-writer Greta Gerwig took off with this terrific twentysomething comedy where the latter plays Frances, a young woman coming to grips with a life she mistakenly thinks she has figured out. Once she breaks up with her boyfriend because they can’t agree on co-owning a cat, Frances is buffeted from one meeting and experience to the next with any sympathy undercut by Baumbach and Gerwig’s refusal to release the character from her own flaws. The actress is a marvel as the neurotic optimist, and Baumbach has a far better grip on the follies of youth than when he first approached the subject with Mr Jealousy in 1997. The film is beautifully shot in black and white by cinematographer Sam Levy – to Frances the world is a black and white place – and the bracing comic encounters such as Frances arguing with best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) is matched with bittersweet moments of rhapsody.
Craig Mathieson