SATURDAY
Ozmosis: The Osbournes Marathon
MTV Canada, 8 p.m. Don't believe all the hype (quite a bit of which was shovelled out of this corner of the print world when the show debuted in Canada a few months back). The Osbournes is different, but only in the anemic world of television would it be hailed as a conquering hero. It is an oddity - a real-life look at unreal people, Ozzy Osbourne and his profane kin - but you're not suddenly going to understand the inner workings of life and death as you watch. You might chuckle at the crassness of it all, and the Oz-man who shuffles and mumbles his way through fatherhood and fame is a true roadside accident: You don't want to look, it must be wrong to look, but you look. There are six episodes tonight if you're still curious - and don't want to wait until CTV airs them in the fall - and two specials that were produced after the show stormed the headlines.
Pecker
Independent Film Channel, 9 p.m. Director-writer John Waters is usually an over-the-top creator: In movies such as Mondo Trasho, Polyester and Pink Flamingos he piled on the gross-outs and campy hijinks. In 1998's Pecker, the story of a small-town photographer (Edward Furlong) conquering the New York art world, Waters's signature zing is missing a few decibels. If anything, the scenes that should shock are dull, deadened perhaps by Furlong, who seems to be thinking about the weather as he blankly delivers his lines, but also by the absence of Waters's usual directorial idiosyncracies. He seems content to point out the pretensions and shallowness of the stereotypical high-art critics and patrons, just as Robert Altman timidly poked at fashion in Prêt-à-Porter. Easy targets make for tepid films, it seems. Christina Ricci, in full quizzical mode, does enliven events when she can, but not often enough to wake up Furlong, or the movie as a whole.
SUNDAY
Vacuuming Completely
Nude in Paradise
BBC Canada, 9 p.m. Good heavens, this is a dark, hilarious little number. Director Danny Boyle is the mad Brit behind indie gems Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, but like many auteurs he stumbled under the hot lights in Hollywood. To get over the pain of being responsible for dreck such as The Beach, Boyle made a couple of digitally recorded films and showed them primarily at film festivals. Vacuuming is one of these, and it certainly gets back to his roots. It is the story of a wide-eyed innocent with artistic dreams being thrown into a pit of real-world horror, in this case foul-mouthed vacuum salesmen in a poor section of England. Our ingenue, Pete (Michael Begley), is saddled with the worst of the bunch, Tommy Rag (Timothy Spall), as his mentor and tormentor. Spall makes Rag into one of film's all-time worst characters: He rivals and even surpasses the king of the genre, Harvey Keitel's rogue cop in The Bad Lieutenant. And yet just as the whole endeavour seems headed for shock value only, Tommy, this vile hold-out of a dying breed, offers a prophecy of his own demise, surrounded by piles of newspapers chronicling fellow relics of the 20th century. The writing in this scene is beautiful and layered, and suddenly a film with horrendous lows proves it can deliver the high notes as well.
The Andy Dick Show
MTV Canada, 10:30 p.m. MTV Canada is airing our national embarassment, Tom Green, in his creatively titled The Tom Green Show (10 p.m.), back-to-back with the man who dragged down the otherwise laudable NewsRadio, Andy Dick, in his creatively titled The Andy Dick Show. Dick played nerd-boy Matthew on NewsRadio, and he was annoying and manic. On his parody of a talk show, like Green on his parody of a talk show, he is annoying and manic. It's summer and it's a new thing, so do enjoy if these guys are your cup of flat pop, but I'm so sick of Green and Dick I wouldn't cross the street to kick them in their...
MONDAY
Wild Asses
National Geographic, 7 p.m. I wish I were a better person. I hear the perfectly academic phrase, "Stone Age hunters chased the wild ass wherever they found it," and I snicker. If I could elevate my thoughts I could enjoy a perfectly agreeable, at times captivating, nature documentary. The wild asses, or onagers, inhabit an inhabitable place, the Little Rann of Kutch, on India's west coast. For most of the year it is a brutal desert, and then, in August, the whole thing floods. What makes Wild Asses a pleasureable filler of time is its focus on the whole area of the Rann, not simply the resilient, stubborn asses. The segment on the people who also eke out a living on the plain and its yearly transformation from desert to archipelago highlight the word geographic in the channel's name: It is the shifting dynamic of the place that dominates and fascinates.
Great Books:
All Quiet on the Western Front
Discovery Civilization, 8 p.m. A little
culture to end a zany dose of Digital Highlights (and a nice quiet title, with no distracting words to hinder our weekly entertainment): The Great Books series tackles the First World War novel by Erich Maria Remarque, published in 1929. It humanizes the conflict of nations fighting nations, and is a classic antiwar book. If you want to continue in this theme, find the 1930 film version, a wondrous movie with a heartrending, symbolic ending.