pay Inside the Actors Studio: Bryan Cranston
Arts, 5pm
Bryan Cranston arrives to a standing ovation and the award-winning actor proves a candid subject and a compelling storyteller. As always, host James Lipton – who here looks like's he's had too close an encounter with a spray tan – moves chronologically through his guest's career. So Cranston recounts how he shaped his wonderfully nutty father character in Malcolm in the Middle, why his silences can speak volumes in Breaking Bad and why Walter White wears tighty-whities. Then it's on to why he took to the stage as LBJ in All the Way. On a more personal note, Cranston discusses how the breakdown of his family affected him as a child and prompted an early ambition to be a policeman. This relatively recent episode also takes in his work on Trumbo, as well as a useful tip for the assembled students about why an audition should not be regarded as an interview. Debi Enker
Wild Sri Lanka
SBS, 7.35pm
Here's to the gently soporific qualities of a good wildlife doco, where the eternal cycle of life and death is wrapped up in a neat hour. It's over to Sri Lanka, where thousands of lakes are the blue light disco social hub for a bunch of critters including leopards (the biggest in the world), deer and monkeys (who team up across the species divide to keep lookout against those leopards). Wild Sri Lanka also has plenty of elephants. On the beach. Repeat: elephants on the beach. If that doesn't rock your boat, try the impressive honey buzzard. As always, the question is who to barrack for. The deer? The leopard? Will they all perish together in the big dry when the lakes turn into puddles? Just when everything looks like it's going to hell in a handbasket, the heavens open. Nature has a way of doing that. Larissa Dubecki
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movie American Pie (1999)
7Mate, 8.30pm
American Pie screenwriter Adam Herz had a deep knowledge of raunchy '80s teen comedies, and he attempted to recreate that imaginary world with his tale of four male American high school students who vow that they will lose their virginity before senior prom. Various shenanigans occur, thanks to baked goods and the blatantly fantasy-like figure of a European exchange student (Shannon Elizabeth), but in Paul and Chris Weitz's film the gross-out humour is offset by the doltish everyday nature of the boys (played by Jason Biggs, Chris Klein, Thomas Ian Nicholas, and Eddie Kaye Thomas), and the way their monomaniacal enthusiasm for sex is balanced by their female equivalents (Tara Reid, Mena Suvari and Alyson Hannigan), who must decide what to bestow on them and whether it will actually be a pleasurable experience. The film's success generated three sequels, all increasingly weighted towards Seann William Scott's comic relief character Steve Stifler. Craig Mathieson
movie Thief (1981)
stan.com.au
With his glistening nightscapes and bursts of expressively elemental image making, Michael Mann reinvented the crime drama by bringing the existential detachment of Jean-Pierre Melville and the procedural depth of Jules Dassin into the modern American city. Set in Chicago, an urban grid that operates with the wired certainty of the monitoring gear used during his heists, Thief stars James Caan as Frank, a former convict and high-end thief whose independence is compromised by starting a relationship with Jessie (Tuesday Weld), herself a survivor of the drugs trade, just as he signs up with a criminal syndicate to pursue larger scores. "You gotta get to where nothing means nothing," says Frank to Jessie, explaining how he lasted 11 years inside, and when he's caught between his new boss, Leo (Robert Prosky), and corrupt cops, he has to go back to that mindset. Mann's compositions reveal self-destruction to be a means of survival. Craig Mathieson