grodscorp@grods.comGrodsNibbles
 | Posted by The Editor on Sunday 10 February 2008, 12:18 pm Categories: Film, GrodsNibbles, Media, Society Tags: ABC, Asians, BadBoys, carsick, Cloverfield, DavidKoch, Ghostbusters, logos, OrthographicNazi, police, Sunrise, watermark |
1) Sunrise
They love Channel Seven’s Sunrise at my gym. It’s on all the televisions and I can’t escape the brain cell-killing, journalism-defiling, populist mundanery when I’m there before work in the mornings. Last week I saw two things that had me groaning out loud:
* A news item voiceover went something like this: “A new survey reveals that Victorians are becoming more tolerant of Asians. It shows that we are more accepting of them in our communities.” The overlay pictures? A smiling white man purchasing groceries from a smiling Asian woman in a corner store.
* The sports “reporter” told us about his experience at the V8 Supercar launch the previous night, spending about 30 seconds on the cars and drivers and two minutes on the V8 Supercar XXXX dancing girls (complete with overlay footage of XXXX dancing girls consisting almost entirely of gratuitous closeups of the girls’ wiggling arses.) After the “reporter” threw back to Cocky Kochy we saw Mel holding her head in her hands. Kochy — being the SNAG we all know him as — asked the “reporter” to talk some more about the XXXX girls. So he did. For another minute. With the footage playing on a loop.
2) Cops with cultural awareness
Whilst walking my bike home the other day I witnessed Victoria’s finest displaying their celebrated cultural sensitivity. A cop on a motorcycle pulled over next to an Asian man in a car at the lights. The cop asked the man to turn left and pull over. The light turned green and the man drove straight through the lights and pulled over. The cop pulled up behind the man, got off his motorbike angrily and stormed up the driver’s window.
COP: (screaming) Why did you drive straight through the lights! I told you to turn left!
MAN: (confused) Uuuh…
COP: (still screaming) When a police officer tells you to do something you have to do it!
MAN: (confused) Uuuh…
COP: (getting hoarse) So if I told you to turn left why did you go straight ahead?
MAN: (panicking) Uuuh…
COP: (normal speaking volume) Um, do you speak English?
MAN: Uuuh…
3) ABC branding
ABC TV has introduced new logos to differentiate between its current and future television channels. As with everything else on ABC this idea has been imported from the UK’s BBC.
Now, watermarking (the faint or not-so-faint white translucent station logo in the corner of the screen) is not a new phenomenon but the ABC have started slapping the new logos on their stream at about 20% transparency and about 150% the size they should be. Fucking distracting, to say the least.
4) Cloverfield
Went to see Cloverfield last night. It was okay — not crap, not brilliant, just okay. The motion sickness thing that I’ve heard all about is totally true because I’ve never seen so many film walkouts in a non-film festival film. I reckon easily a dozen people left, including the girl sitting next to me (not McBec, who was sitting the other side of me.) This poor woman felt so crap that she emptied her giant popcorn on the ground and held the empty container under her face for a while before getting up to leave.
I’ve got to admit that I felt a bit woozy at times and even had to close my eyes once or twice when the handycam wobble got a little bit too much for me. However, McBec, who is the ultimate carsick chick, didn’t feel a thing!
5) Orthographic fascism
When we got home from Cloverfield we watched the end of Ghostbusters on Channel Ten (great film) and the first twenty minutes of Bad Boys just to laugh at Will Smith’s ’90s haircut and Martin Lawrence’s ’90s clothes. In this time I noticed two errors:
* A sign at the entrance to a helipad read: “Authorization Personnel Only”
* A title on a computer screen read: “Guards desk”
I’m so anal I disgust even myself.
GrodsThink Ep.31 (16/9/08)
Sunday 10 February 2008, 12:52 pm #krypto
perhaps the Victorian police force should change their motto from “uphold the right (wing)” to “bang-bang….stop or I’ll shoot”
I wonder how many deals with the devil Christine Nixon had to do to get rid of all her rivals in one “night of the long knives”.
Sunday 10 February 2008, 5:49 pm #Damian
I’m subjected to those telly screens at the gym, too. One of them must be Sunrise, but to be honest they all look the same - piss weak clones of American news channels, all smiling numbskulls and poor jokes with a scrolling band of “news” (mostly just upcoming programs on the same channel or numbers you can send an SMS to so you can win some shit you never knew you wanted) while the interview in progress centres on populist or just plain boring issues and the main points are summarised in yet-another-fucking-caption. Then, of course, the annoying token-gay camp-as-buggery “Hollywood reporter” makes an appearance, with the same recycled footage of red carpet celeb-posing on all channels at once, so that even if you look around to the other telly you still see the same stupid grinning mugs. Fuck off!
Sunday 10 February 2008, 8:27 pm #Bron
Yeah, but do you like it?!
Sad but true fact: I didn’t renew my gym membership because those bloody tv screens and the lameshit shows on them pissed me off too much.
Sunday 10 February 2008, 11:22 pm #John Surname
I love the “debates” they have. Sunrise get a man (who always repesents the conservative viewpoint) and a woman (the weaker, touchy-feely liberal viewpoint), seat them at opposite ends of the table to make it look like they’re facing off, and then ask them inane questions on a subject. But instead of letting them debate, they’ll ask the guy, say, “Isn’t it true that all Muslims are terrorists?” and he’ll bang his fists and agree, and then they’ll turn to the woman and ask her “But isn’t also true that we can’t prove it?”, which she’ll agree to.
More often than not they agree with each other anyway. My favourite one was when they asked them “How do you spread your Vegemite?” (because you’re un-Australian if you don’t eat Vegemite) and both sheepishly admitted that they don’t eat it. Ha.
Monday 11 February 2008, 7:35 am #Wah
If they had Sunrise in the gym studio in which I do boxing classes, I bet I’d be 150 per cent more productive in my punching - God help the person holdding the pads as I picture Kochie and Mel on each of them.
As far Bad Boys. It isn’t widely known that in 1998 the Howard Government introduced legislation that Channel 10 has to show Bad Boys and/or Bad Boys II at least once every 72 days.
Monday 11 February 2008, 10:40 am #Bron
Yeah, Wah, I’ve noticed Bad Boys occuring on a too-regular basis.
I’d much rather watch The Sound of Music.
Speaking of crap TV, I note that Good News Week makes its return tonight, complete with tokenistic American TV actor whose name I don’t even know but I recognise his face from Supernatural.
Is this end of Good News Week (again) before it even started?
And who else finds Paul McDermott waving his arms everywhere in a robotic manner an annoying shit?
Monday 11 February 2008, 11:34 am #Ant Rogenous
Paul McDermott can kiss my quoit with that cheese-eating show-tune grin of his.
Monday 11 February 2008, 11:46 am #The Editor
Apparently they’ve only brought it back because of the US writers’ strike. The test pattern would’ve been cheaper and attracted better ratings.
Monday 11 February 2008, 12:36 pm #Wah
Apparently they ended the writers strike today, just to stop GNW from staying on air.