Monday's TV: Sons of Namatjira, I Am Legend, The Mentor and Impossible Peace
Sons of Namatjira
NITV, 8.30pm
Artist Keith Namatjira and other family members still live in the camp established by their father Albert in the 1950s – a collection of humpies in the desert just outside Alice Springs. He makes money selling his landscapes to tourists and gallery owners, worries that urban development will swamp the camp and dreams of opening his own gallery. From always-watchable documentary maker Curtis Levy (The President Versus David Hicks; The Matilda Candidate), Sons of Namatjira quietly probes the uncomfortable relationship between Indigenous and white Australia, recording the tourists determined to get their hands on a Namatjira and paternalistic gallery owners after their slice of the pie. Curtis says it's a parable of race relations in Australia, and it's impossible not to agree. LD
I Am Legend (2007)
Go, 8.30pm
In this post-apocalyptic thriller, where a mutated cancer cure has killed 90 per cent of humanity and turned the vast majority of survivors into vampire-like creatures that roam in the dark, Will Smith plays US Army virologist Robert Neville, who seems to be the last human left alive in New York. He stalks a metropolis returning to nature during the day (the digital effects are tremendous), and spends his night inside a fortified home searching for a cure. Without other actors to bounce off for much of the film, the customary Smith braggadocio is muted and melancholic, and the onset of derangement becomes palpable as Robert's loneliness overwhelms his judgment. Smith's scene where he loses his one companion, the dog that is all that remains of his pre-disease family, is the most powerful piece of work he's done, and it makes up for the blunt religious metaphor that closes the movie. CM
The Mentor
Seven, 8.45pm
Small business as a spectator sport? A tenuous concept gets its moment in the reality TV sun with the help of Australian businessman Mark Bouris, the high-flying host of this tepid confection paying his good fortune forward while bigging up his not always solid credentials as a corporate success story. The Mentor is really the small business answer to Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen, with less vomiting and swearing but the same white knight posturing over a cast of battlers losing their dough in the small business arena. Bouris sets challenges for his proteges, scolds them and steps in to rescue them from dodgy fit-outs and sky-high rents, which tells the audience less about business wisdom, more about the vanity of a corporate Sugar Daddy. LD
Impossible Peace
Monday, History (pay TV), 9.30pm
There was a little more than 20 years of "peace" between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. Anyone watching this illuminating documentary series from Australian writer-director Michael Cove (Anzac Battlefields, For Valour) will be astonished that there was as much as 20 minutes. Tonight Cove focuses on the period from 1922 to 1925, when the entire northern hemisphere seems to be in chaos. Syria is rising up against France, which has occupied part of Germany, which is racked by political murders and hyperinflation that at one point sees the value of the German mark fall from 630,000 to the US dollar to 630 billion to the dollar in just three months. Cove and his cohort of British academics present the swirl of ominously interconnected events clearly and in unsensational context. Highly recommended. BN