THE 2006 MELBOURNE COMMONWEALTH GAMES: my highlights

WELL, the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne are finally over and - after a couple of weeks of great ratings - we can now safely watch Channel Nine return to being "still No. 2" for the rest of the year. But give the Network credit for providing Aussies with the most jingoistic, nationalistic, biased, badly commentated Games ever. Hooray!

Helen and I wound up watching far more of the Games than we intended to 'cos we were on holidays and we had the TV on as background noise while chilling at the beach.

So we heard and saw most of the hype as Australia won three billion gold medals, destroying such sporting superpowers as the Isle Of Man, Lesotho and Malta in the process. Go, Aussie, go!

Talkback radio's been raving about the highlights of this year's Games. Well, here are mine:

1. The female Aussies' dominance in the swimming pool...one suspects all those world records broken along the way were due to massive steroid abuse but, as we all know, Aussies don't take steroids and they don't cheat.....BWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
2. Poor misunderstood Jana Pittman winning the 400m hurdles gold (yet still remaining the most hated athlete in Australia in the eyes of many punters).
3. John Steffensen acting like a complete goose after winning the men's 400 metres final. If a Yank carried on like he did after the race, the Aussie media would've crucified them.
4. Rugby moron Phil Gould giving "top analysis" on the Nine Network to sports he has no idea about, namely track-and-field. My jaw dropped listening to his racist, one-eyed blathering about 5000m silver medallist Craig Mottram being "ganged up on" by three Kenyan runners, of whom Augustine Choge eventually won. Phil, the reason why they were able to "triple-team" Mottram was 'cos Australia only had one decent runner while Kenya had THREE. That's just the way it goes, you fuck-faced dick! Even Mottram admitted he was beaten by the better man.
5. Daryl Eastlake's inability to pronounce one single name in the weightlifting...to the point where every non-Australian competitor was simply referred to as "the boy from India" or he'd pronounce their name phonetically (and really slowly...)
6. Speaking of Daryl, he and co-commentator Dean Lukin (an Olympic gold medallist ONLY 'cos the Eastern Bloc boycotted the 1984 Games. He's also a member of a truly horrible fishing family in Port Lincoln. Just ask anyone who dealt with them - including me - and they'll tell you the Lukin family are a bunch of CUNTS) were the worst commentators in Melbourne, hands down. They provided absolutely NO insight into weightlifting; it was just Daryl bellowing inanely at the top of his voice while Deano kept sniggering during the women's snatch competition and saying stupid stuff like, "She's got a lovely snatch."
7. I cannot emphasise how BAD the weightlifting commentary was. But the Nine Network loves Daryl's bullshit (this is his fourth Commonwealth Games after all)...to the point where the event was always introduced as, "Coming up...the weightlifting with big Daryl Eastlake!" As if Daryl was more important than the event itself. I can't tell you how angry that made me.
8. Walking - stupidest event ever. The only sport where competitors can cheat...TWICE...and still get away with it. Then they get all crybaby weepy when they cheat a THIRD time and get disqualified. Get over it, you losers. Take up a real sport like running instead!
9. Finally, ya gotta love Nine's commitment to mediocrity. Every Aussie athlete was interviewed after their event, even if they placed last. There were virtually no interviews done with medal winners from other countries. And you barely heard a national anthem apart from our own in the medal ceremonies. God, I hate patriotism.

CRACKER NIGHT: One last thing...

The taping of the comedy special we attended recently - "Cracker Night", the opening night of Sydney's 2006 CRACKER Comedy Festival - screened on thecomedychannel last night.

It was a one-hour special, which means the producers cut out about 60 minutes of dross, which only helped improve the show's quality. For example, over-rated corporate "comedian" Vince Sorrenti's five minutes of shite was edited down to one minute...and it still wasn't funny (his one half-decent gag was stolen from elsewhere). The lame, off-the-cuff stylings of hosts Mikey "I'm going to die of a heart attack soon" Robbins and The Sandman were also viciously pruned. God knows how Tahir kept his spot - maybe he threatened to bomb thecomedychannel studios if they left him out of the special.

They also mixed up the order of things, so the show ended with the brilliant humour of British comic Steven K. Amos. They screened his full five minutes.

As for the guy who topped and tailed the live show, Eddie Perfect...the producers cut him out entirely: ALL TEN MINUTES of his crap. Hehehe...

Eddie Perfect's boyfriend writes...

"Dearest Dann,
As an avid eddie perfect follower and lover I think that your comments are harsh and crude and that you, like many other people (reviewers) need to pull your head out of your anus and give people a go without simply shitting all over their efforts!
Eddie I'll have you know is an award winning composer..what are you? A pathetic internet reviewer, well done dip shit!
Hooray for Eddie and his real hair!"

MOVIE PREVIEW: The Hills Have Eyes (out April 20)

WES CRAVEN’S classic 1977 horror flick has been remade and - surprise, surprise - it ain’t half-bad…despite the fact the idea of a bunch of innocent folk getting lost in the wilderness, then attacked by cannibalistic monsters has been done to death in fear flicks during the past few decades.
What makes the new fillum above average - apart from a bigger budget and a solid cast led by Lost star Aussie’s own Emilie de Ravin - is the talented direction of Alexandre Aja. The Frenchman helmed the stylish and ultra-gory, but ultimately really stupid, High Tension (see Hot Stuff, February 20, 2006).
In his reimagining (don’tcha just love that term?) of The Hills Have Eyes, the evil mutant clan are the descendants of miners affected by US atomic bomb tests in the 40s and 50s.
When a dysfunctional family travelling to California take a wrong turn and wind up in the stinking hot desert, they quickly fall pray to Papa Jupiter (Billy Drago), Pluto (Michael Bailey Smith) and their depraved chums.
With the scares coming thick and fast - coupled with loads of shocking violence - The Hills Have Eyes may be the best shit-yer-pants to hit Oz cinemas in years.
Final word: Most remakes stink worse than baboon turds, but The Hills Have Eyes is bloody good (with heavy emphasis on the bloody).

One man's comedy...

WHAT is comedy? That's the question going through my mind after me and Helen attended "Cracker Night" last night, the official opening of the 2006 CRACKER Comedy Festival.
Sydney's Enmore Theatre was chockers with tons of folk who, like us, had scored free tickets for some reason or another.
This meant the star-studded line-up of international and local comedians were gonna have to work extra-hard to impress a crowd who hadn't come to see any one comic in particular.
In the end, "Cracker Night" - which was filmed for a future screening on Foxtel's thecomedychannel - was, like many of these ensemble events, a mixed bag.
The night was hosted by co-comperes Stephen "The Sandman" Abbott and an obese Mikey Robbins. Mikey seriously needs to lose A LOT OF WEIGHT. Otherwise, I don't think he'll be alive this time next year. Sandy was, as usual, mediocre...a trait he shares with many other Aussie comedians who make their living on radio ("radio...where no-one can hear if the audience is laughing"). He thinks he's witty, Mikey thinks he's witty. So why wasn't the crowd fucking laughing?
Each comedian was given a five-minute time limit - this proved to be a blessing for many of the local acts, who barely had enough material to fill half their allotted time.
All except...Eddie Perfect, a young comic singer who, inexplicably, was given TEN minutes to open and close the shows. His opening song - a woefully outdated, prolonged attack on Network Nine personality Ray Martin's reporting on the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami - was a shocking way to start proceedings. It's hard to believe, but by the end of Perfect's pitiful rant, I felt sorry for Ray.
Thankfully, things picked up as soon as Eddie left the stage. Expat Yank Tommy Dean was brilliant, as was Lebanese funnyman Akmal's confronting take on the Cronulla riots.
Charlie Pickering suffers from The Sandman's complaint - he also shouldn't steal routines from other (better) comedians.
The Kransky Sisters playing Pop Music on the tuba's a cute act, but I wouldn't exactly call them comedians. Elliott Goblet's act of monotone-voiced one-liners hasn't changed since 1986 - good luck to him, I guess, if he can get away with it.
The high point of the first half came with Scottish comedian Danny Bhoy - whose fresh routines on crocodiles sneaking onto Kakadu tour buses and him giving a French family directions in Edinburgh while using a French accent had my jaws aching with laughter - and American Arj Barker who half-arsed his way through his five minutes, but was still a cack-and-a-half.
The idiots who organised "Cracker Night" again showed their complete lack of judgment by wrapping up the first half with Tahir, whose only claim to fame is he appears on SBS TV's Pizza, a "comedy" watched by fuck-all people. Tahir isn't funny: he thinks he is, though, by liberally throwing out words like "lebs" and "wogs", insulting children who suffer from ADD, interacting with an audience who aren't interesting in interacting back, and stealing jokes that were old when I first ran them in People mag's "Crack Attack" column five years ago. Tahir could have taken a leaf from Akmal's act. Better still, he could've just stayed the fuck away from Enmore and left the comedy to the experts.
Intermission: time for a desperately needed drink.
Helen and I got back to the theatre part-way through an excerpt from Canadian Jerome Sable and Eli Batalion's production of HIP-HOP 4 DUMMEEZ. This was pretty cool.

The best thing about the second half of the evening was Steven K. Amos (left), a UK comic who was fucking hilarious. I think that's the nicest aspect of a show like "Cracker Night", it gave us an idea of what individuals are worth seeing live and which acts we should avoid.
Speaking of avoid, that's what we should've done for the rest of the event. Kiwi Brendhan Lovegrove was average, Jackie Loeb can impersonate a few female singers but screaming in a microphone ISN'T funny.
Mick Meredith's claim to fame is a few guest appearances on The Footy Show. Nuff said. Also, he's a fan of Nickelback which makes him A COMPLETE CUNT.

Vince Sorrenti makes money doing corporate gigs. He, too, is a CUNT. He hasn't been funny in over 20 years. His act was shit.
And then the organisers ended proceedings with another dose of Eddie Perfect. I assume he got 10 minutes 'cos he's blowing someone. Anyway, Eddie sang a painfully offensive anti-gay song (it was in the guise of an anti-Hillsong rant, making fun of their homophobia, but Eddie's so crap it just came out as being anti-gay). People were filing out of the auditorium as he sang (including me), and that turned into a full-scale evacuation when he tried to get the audience to sing along with him. It was a shoddy, depressing end to what had otherwise been a fairly reasonable (if patchy) evening of comedy.
Well, at least something positive came out of the experience: Helen and I won't be wasting our money this year going to see an Eddie Perfect gig.

- DANN LENNARD

PS Among the celeb guests in the crowd were top-notch comedy producer Mark Fitzgerald and his lovely wife Indira Naidoo, Garry Who (who?) and Libby "Elle McFeast" Gorr (age hasn't been kind to the poor dear).