102 LISTENER AUGUST 10 2019
THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT
THE WAR ON HATE: With
neo-nazis stomping
around Europe and a
US President insult-
ing congresswomen
of colour on Twitter,
we definitely need a
satire that looks hate
in the eye and giggles.
Taika Waititi’s new film
Jojo Rabbit, about a
German boy whose
imaginary friend is Hitler (played by Waititi) will
debut at next month’s Toronto Film Festival.
Meanwhile, the trailer has been getting a lot of
online response (tinyurl.com/NZLJojoRabbit), includ-
ing another brilliant Downfall parody that was
posted by the movie’s Twitter account: tinyurl.
com/NZLJojoDownfall.OLD TOWN REMIX: A “country-trap” song that
could not have been made without the internet
has now become the longest-running No 1 hit in
the US. Rapper Lil Nas X bought the beat from
an online store (that’s a thing) for $30, created
the song and promoted it via the social media
video app TikTok. However, when the track
made it on to both the country and R&B charts,
Billboard removed it from the country chart
for not being country enough. Enter gen-u-ine
country star Billy Ray Cyrus and a remix that
sent the song to No 1 on Billboard’s top 100:
tinyurl.com/NZLOldTown.Succession, Monday.for as long as possible. The
series opened in 1965 and, in
season five, has just reached
1968, beginning with a story
involving a Fabergé egg alleg-
edly owned by the Romanovs
and the murders of a gangster
and an Oxford don. Morse is
now a detective sergeant and
he has a new sidekick, a young
chap called George Fancy. As
always, the stories are carefully
crafted and decidedly unhur-
ried. Just wait until season six,
when Morse has a moustache.MONDAY AUGUST 12
Succession (SoHo, Sky 010,
1.00pm and 9.30pm). Jesse
Armstrong, who created Peep
Show and wrote for The Thick
of It, swears his drama series is
not based on the Murdochs,
although he makes it hard not
to compare. There’s an ageing
media mogul (Brian Cox) and
the horrid offspring who are
vying to take control of the
business. It’s brutal, pithy,
sweary and so much about the
overheated times we live in. In
season two, there’s the same
vying for position, but Cox’s
Logan Roy is looking increas-
ingly worse for wear. He’son the acquisition warpath,
although it appears Cherry
Jones and Holly Hunter won’t
be going down without a fight.
In particular, Armstrong is
going to explore tech compa-
nies “being at the heels” of big
media companies and, he told
the Hollywood Reporter, “the
direct interface that some busi-
nesspeople have with Twitter”.
If you need a catch-up, season
one is screening as a box set on
SoHo on Saturday, starting at
10.35am.Active Measures (History,
Sky 073, 8.30pm). This is the
first of what will likely be an
avalanche of documentaries
about the Donald Trump
presidential campaign’s ties
with Russia. However, director
Jack Bryan takes the story back
in time to make the case that
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB
officer, has been interfering in
Western democracies for 30
years, with his biggest success
to date being the current US
President. The earliest connec-
tion Bryan found was the sale
of five Trump Tower condos
to a Russian mobster in 1984,
which was ruled to be moneyOnline
Catch of the Week
SVOD HIGHLIGHT: What’s
good in video streaming
on demand. Not one, but
two New Zealanders
appear in Amazon Prime
Video’s new series The
Boys, which is based on
the comic-book by Garth
Ennis, who also wrote
Preacher. It’s a salty show
about a world in which superheroes, who are
literally more powerful than everyone else, have
become corrupt. Antony Starr plays “supe”
Homelander and Karl Urban is Billy Butcher, the
leader of The Boys.Jojo Rabbit