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Reviews
Dirty Jobs (2005)
I just love this show
What I love about this show is the respect that Mike has for the work and the workers. Sure, he's funny and uses pretty black humour, but even the best house of the richest person in the world has got a toilet which will overflow a mass of raw sewage if it'd not working properly. Enter Mike. He talks to the people who get in there and fix the things up, who clean up the crap. He mentions the unmentionable but he never talks down to anyone. He demonstrates the skills involved by trying to do the job himself, which though not always successful is usually funny. Some of the comments about this show say stuff like "I wouldn't want my kids to do this". Maybe so, but someone's got to do it. Maybe if more kids started their careers doing "Dirty Jobs" they might be better employees and/or employers later on because of it. And they might even discover that the good feeling you get from being good at a dirty job that no-one else wants to tackle. Being a farmer, I get to see all the crap jobs as well as the "good" jobs, and my experience is that usually, the dirtier the job, the more enjoyable the company of the people you work with. Mike Rowe has found that out too which is one of the reasons the show is so successful.
Mr. Reliable (1996)
A somewhat under-rated good little Australian movie
I am probably over critical of most Australian movies, basically on account of the cringe factor, ie,"Gees, they're not going to show THAT somewhere else, are they." Once in a while though, you come across a domestic gem, like "Muriels Wedding", "The Dish", "The Castle", and "Paperback Hero", which I just love to bits, and they seem to put the Australian idiom into some kind of sense, and I love ém. Well anyway, I just found another one to add to that list."Mr Reliable." I remember the incident in the late sixties, when Wally Mellish held his girlfriend/de facto, Beryl Muddle (Yes folks, they were their real names) up in a hostage situation for 5 or 6 days, and it was the talk of the media for a long while. Anyway, it is a lovely, funny, easy to watch little movie that is well worth wasting a couple of hours of your life on. I doubt very much whether Wally was such a likable idiot in real life, and Beryls legs probably didn't go all the way to the ground like they did in the movie, but it is a good watch. You can see the various scrapes that they get into coming a mile away, which really only give the whole thing a sense of inevitability. And it is a great snapshot of mid sixties Australia, in so many respects. The summer heat, the cars, the crowds, the emerging hippy culture, the xenophobia as regards "new Australians", the black and white television. Well worth a look.