TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

I've written about television show promotions using over inflated taglines that are total exaggerations of what will actually happen on the program before in This Blog Post Will Change Everything . Lately the Nine Television Network Australia has been favoring the tagline "The episode that will have all Australia talking!" (I may be paraphrasing but I'm fairly certain that's the tagline). It's been used to promote new episodes of at least two shows currently airing on the network; Fat Tony & Co and Love Child . The former is based on one of Australia's most notorious underworld figures whilst the latter tells the stories of young women and men fighting an unjust system in 1969 at the Kings Cross Hospital. I've been watching both shows and whist each is fairly dramatic, with their fair share of twists and turns, it's nothing that we haven't really seen before. Certainly nothing that'll get all Australia talking. Neither is e...

The Monuments men written by (with Grant Heslov), directed and stars George Clooney and features Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman and Cate Blanchett is, I feel, an important film, based on a true story, but was not quite what I was expecting. Set during the final years of World War II, Frank Stokes (Clooney) puts together a team of misfit soldiers, with more knowledge between them about art history than war or fighting. The team is charged with the task of locating and returning important works of art stolen by the Nazis during the course of the war, spirited away, destined to either be destroyed or appear in Hilter's great art museum. It's certainly an interesting story from the great war. That anyone had the foresight to rescue as much art as they did, in light of the death, destruction and general harsh conditions faced by everyone involved. Although I was aware the Nazis did destroy and steal quite a considerable amount of significant artworks it's one of ...

C-3PO If there's one thing that could set off the Robot uprising it's beating them at sports. C-3PO  in Star Wars: A New Hope observed that "nobody worries about upsetting a droid" and I think that could be the downfall of the human race. Robot manufacturer, Kuka Robotics , have developed a robot arm that can match it with one of the world's best table tennis players, former world number one, Timo Boll. Well at least that's what they want us to believe. See their promotion video below. If you watch the making of this video (below) you'll get the sense that the match probably wasn't real with some fairly extreme plays being staged for dramatic effect. Personally I think the arm is probably fast enough to play table tennis but is actually no real match for Timo. However... there in lies the problem. If we keep beating robots at sports they're going to develop low self esteem until one day a robot just snaps and the robot uprising begins...

A new video going around by HUVr Tech is trying to convince us that they've finally invented the hoverboard exactly like those that appear in the Back to the Future movies. A bunch of stars are featured including original Doc Emmertt Brown, Christopher Lloyd, professional skateboarder, Tony Hawk (of course) and international musician, Moby. The video claims that the demonstration is 100 percent real but I gotta say the hokey physics displayed by people actually riding these HUVr boards is just as dodgy as the original movies. Not to mention the whole demonstration feels completely staged with not a genuine emotion about how awesome the invention of real hoverboards would actually be. There's speculation that the video and companion website may be a promotion for a fourth movie in the BTTF series but my money is on a Virtual Reality computer game of some sort. Why do I think that? First because the website talks about an upcoming phone app that tracks your location...