Eurovision 2010: Prepare Yourself for Retrovision

Apparently Slovenia has decided to turn back to clock to the days of Yugoslavia, because this would not look out of place in the 1980s.

Good luck, because they will need it.

 

 

Mind you, this may very well be a retro-vision year as the Dutch entry is unabashedly 1970s kitsch (even written by the man who wrote the 1973 entry…which actually is better than this chirpy dross, in my humble opinion)

 

Finland has gone for the ever-popular two blondes and an accordion combination.

 

Iceland has also opted go for their traditional strength: dance pop belted out by a woman with a big voice. (Well, they’re also borrowing from Kate-Don’t-Mess-With-Me-Fellas-Ryan)

 

And Denmark’s winner recalls not the happy-go-lucky Danish entries of the 1980s, but pretty much every 1980s rock ballad ever made.

 

As for the hosts: Norway has gone moody. Really moody. Not bleak, but 1990s Ireland moody. (He has looks on his side, but that didn’t help Iceland back in 2004, did it?)

 

Poland sends another ballad, but wait…it’s a male singer and it’s folk(ish).

 

Macedonia also does the exact same thing they’ve been doing since pretty much time memorable, which is insert rap into some really dated song. This year it’s really bland rock-rap. (And I still bet they’ll get really close into qualifying.)

 

Finally, Switzerland has an upbeat song in French, which also wouldn’t be out of place in 1980s Eurovision or 1980s French children’s television. (He’s singing about it raining gold, and the first thing that came to my mind was the Mysterious Cities of Gold. Anyone else think the same thing?)

 

The UK’s entry will be written by Pete Waterman, and if anyone could out-retro this lot, it’s the man who was part of the trio who put Kylie Minogue on the map.

1 Chalet Rendez-vous = 1 more season of Crap TV

We’re in the ratings season now, and honestly, the most interesting programmes on Australian television continue to be imports from Canada (Little Mosque on the Prairie), New Zealand (Outrageous Fortune and Go Girls repeats), the UK (The Bill 2.0: Bleaker than’ eck), and the US (well, The Good Wife and Two and a Half Men—yes, I said it).

Nine has got the Winter Olympics, so we can cut them some minor slack until that wraps up, but Seven has been coasting on the success of its reality programming (Border Security, which should keep Grant Bowler free to do whatever he wants), and Ten seems think that all and sundry still wants to watch Talkin’ Bout Your Generation—despite sliding ratings.

Not much hope for new Australian drama on the horizon it seems.

Well, thanks to Senator Stephen Conroy (the current Communications Minister), that forecast looks to remain unchanged. Conroy apparently had a meeting with Seven’s boss Kerry Stokes in Vail last month, and magically the government gave the Free-to-Air networks a Scrooge McDuck calibre rebate on their TV license fees. (Read Uncle Rupert’s take on the whole fracas here.)

I wouldn’t have a problem with that per se, except for one fact: the networks can do whatever they want with the money to make whatever Australian programming they want.

No restrictions on whether it is for drama/comedy or reality, which could very well lead to yet another year of constant fly-on-the-wall docusoaps creating more disposable sub-lebrities for them to further flog via their magazine divisions.

Oh joy.

Monday Jukebox is Scandal(ous)

Some big news: This corner of the internet may be moving to Tasmania by the end of the first quarter of 2010.

Factor in the recent controversy over the TV license rebate that the networks may be getting and it seems that Scandal is an appropriate song for today’s jukebox.

Out from the gloomy past

Well, who would thought John Mayer was such a…hmmm…Neanderthal?

Personally, it’s no real loss on my part as I never cared for anything of his in the first place. Is it that shocking that the man whose first big hit was an ode to sex is a womanising pig? Not particularly, in fact, given that Mayer was downing malt liquor (oh, the irony!) I have to wonder whether his real purpose was to kill off the John Mayer image in a blaze of glory…while still maintaining his career.

I didn’t really come to this conclusion until I read Brendan Shanahan’s opinion piece in today’s Sydney Morning Herald. Entitled “Take heart, Cupid’s not a racist,” Shanahan argues that finding people of certain races unattractive does not make one racist, because of the “illogical nature of sexual attraction itself.”

Yes, because sexual attraction makes no sense at all, it is totally possible to rule out entire ethnicities composed of people you have never met or never seen.

Hilariously, Shanahan seems to think that in these modern times we don’t live with the cultural stereotypes of the past, which is why he thinks we should be horrified by the song Brown Sugar, which talks about slave women being raped by their master in New Orleans. Yes, we’re horrified, but it also is portraying a period in time, documented not only by narrative but by people. (Hi Brendan, I’m one of them. Black Americans didn’t magically appear from anywhere.)

Shanahan does appear to be onto something when he talks about bigoted Australian men being horrified by Asian immigration, but sexually obsessed with submissive Asian women, and gleefully going to brothels to live out their erotic fantasies. He also mentions the classic Mandingo stereotype that black men have.

What he fails mention is that these stereotypes are created by centuries of cultural programming ranging from the Greek myths of the Amazons to Othello to Madame Butterfly and to, yes, Mandingo. (Have you ever heard of Edouard Said, Brendan?)

Shanahan’s assertion that it’s not wrong to prefer one race over another would make sense if we all lived in a bubble devoid of interaction or influences from the outside world as well as classic and popular culture. Yet we don’t.

In his closing paragraph, Shanahan paradoxically advocates miscegenation while still defending the right to unilaterally find people of other races unattractive. Seemingly winking to the reader, Shanahan says not sharing an attraction might make one “unworldly, but doesn’t make [one], or John Mayer, a racist.”

In this sense, not sharing an attraction does not make one racist, but advocating, tolerating, and even mere acceptance of someone’s right to discriminate against entire ethnicities due to skin colour is well…racist.

There are no facts on TV News

In what appears to be a statement made to the Sydney Morning Herald issued from Wonderland, the ACMA has said that television news is not a “factual program.”

Here is how this all came about:

The commercial networks get money from the brokerage arms of the banks (CBA and Macquarie basically) to comment on the day’s financial news, which in many people’s view (including my own) gives them significant influence. Plus it would seem that this arrangement between the banks and the commercial networks would need disclosure under the new code of practice covering the terrestrial channels which came to effect this year. 

One must wonder why the ACMA is so hesitant to rule on this issue.

A Little Bit of Homesickness

I can survive having my birthday during the Austral Summer, but pictures like this still make me long for having my birthday in winter. (courtesy of the ABC)

Have A Realistic Wish

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this.

Ajay Rochester, who used to host the local version of The Biggest Loser apparently is desperate to get fame in the US.

How desperate?

She’ll settle for the Z-list Celebrity Fit Club.

Just read this article from a Daily Telegraph last month, which seems to be taking a degree of glee (I’d say schadenfreunde, except they are no freunde of her) in the misadventures of Miss Rochester.

Personally her story seems like it’s going to end like Inside Daisy Clover.

More Tales of Two Countries

Population and unemployment: this is a bit of an apples and oranges subject(s), especially given the size of Australia and New Zealand.

Nonetheless, it’s rather interesting to see how the local media treats it.

New Zealand: Stop Coming Home and taking our jobs. (TVNZ)

Australia: Perhaps Logan’s Run was a good idea (ABC), Or Soylent Green (ABC), Or bugger it, let’s get more skilled migrants (The Daily Telegraph)

Yes to the remix, No to the redux

Apparently the theme of the day is polished turds in popular culture.

Earlier, I pondered if we’re still stuck in a decade of bad cinema.

Now, let’s shift the focus to music, and a very specific kind of it: the charity pop single.

Warwick McFadyen in today’s Sydney Morning Herald takes the two recent ones (in aid of Haiti) to task, lamenting not the desire to aid, but the almost “let-them-eat-cake” result.

I especially think this section is worth noting:

There is no doubt that Haiti needs all the help the world can give it. More than 170,000 people died when an earthquake struck the impoverished nation on January 12.

But even before that, Haiti was deeply mired in economic and social grief. About four-fifths of the population live in poverty.

Did this lot give a toss beforehand? Not particularly.

All these charity efforts just come across as the idle activities of the talented but bored, especially when they cannot get their pampered arses together to actually write something original.

The decade of bad movies?

Empire Magazine has published a list of the 50 Worst Movies ever made, topping the list is Batman and Robin (which effectively put the franchise in hiatus), but what I found interesting about the top ten was that six of the top ten were made in the previous decade.*

*arguing that the naughties were 2000-2009

I don’t believe that this is just a mere coincidence, there are more chefs in that particular kitchen for that to happen. So what happened in the naughties?

Did potential profit blind the studios to crap cinema?

And if it did, is it possible to reverse the trend?

Perhaps.