Sunday Best

Sunday Best: The King of Kong, 8.33pm, ABC2 / ABC4
Billy Mitchell has held the world record for the Donkey Kong video game for over 20 years. When Steve Wiebe suddenly loses his job, he finds solace in Donkey Kong. Stumbling upon Billy’s record, Steve sets out to break it.

Napoleon, 9.30pm, SBS TWO
A masterful soldier, tactician and statesmen, Napoleon Bonaparte’s courage and love for his country saw him rise from an unpaid general consumed with ambition to the most powerful man in Europe. In this episode, Napoleon executes the Duke of d’Enghien for the attempt on his life and crowns himself emperor. He wages a successful war against Austria and Prussia but is stopped by the Russians in Poland.

My Kitchen Rules, 7.30pm, Seven
National pride is on the line as Megan and Simon from New Zealand go head to head in the sudden death cook-off with Steve and Helen from NSW. It’s neck and neck in the closest battle so far. After a nail bitingly close contest, one team will be eliminated. 

Suburgatory, 8.30pm, GO!
 When Tessa gets her driving permit, Dalia hires her to drive around and stalk Dalia’s crush, Scott, but could Tessa and Scott have feelings for each other?

What NOT to watch:

Waterworld, 6.30pm, 7mate
In a future where the polar ice caps have melted and most of Earth is underwater, a mutated mariner fights starvation and violent outlaws in order to guide a woman and her daughter to dry land. However, it is not the Mariner who holds the key to their freedom. Will these survivalists make it to land before it is too late?

8:30pm – Sunday, March 11 on ABC2

Sunday nights on ABC2 are the home of Sunday Best, an outstanding collection of game-changing and thought-provoking feature length documentaries. We’ve done the work to bring you the best must-see intelligent docos that are just 2 good to miss.

Put on your Sunday Best…

One year on: the Japanese tsunami through the eyes of its youngest survivors.

On March 11, 2011 Japan was hit by the greatest tsunami in a thousand years. Through compelling testimony from 7-10-year-old survivors, the film reveals how the deadly wave and the Fukushima nuclear accident have changed children’s lives forever.

The story unfolds at two key locations: a primary school where 74 children were killed by the tsunami; and a school close to the Fukushima nuclear plant, attended by children evacuated from the nuclear exclusion zone.

Radiation and its possible long-term effects are a constant worry for parents and children who choose to remain in Fukushima. Many parents have placed severe restrictions on where their children can go, how they dress and what they can eat and drink.

“A tsunami is something that comes from deep within the sea. When it arrives it steals our lives, houses and things precious to us.” – Reina, 10.

“The radiation has stuck to the leaves so we’re told we can’t go in the garden without a mask.”- Kosei, 8.

8:30pm – Sunday, February 26 on ABC2

Sunday nights on ABC2 are the home of Sunday Best, an outstanding collection of game-changing and thought-provoking feature length documentaries. We’ve done the work to bring you the best must-see intelligent docos that are just 2 good to miss.

Put on your Sunday Best…

Created by the Oscar-winning director Kevin MacDonald (Last King of Scotland, State of Play, One Day In September), comes this extraordinary film describing one of the most incredible true stories of survival and adventure of our time.

Based on the bestselling novel by Joe Simpson, the BAFTA award-winning, Touching The Void recounts the mountain climb Simpson and his partner Simon Yates undertook in 1985.

These two young men from the north of England, both in their early twenties, set out to climb the 21,000 foot, savage ice-face – the Siula Grande – in the Peruvian Andes. Simpson and Yates embark on an ‘Alpinestyle’ climb – with no back-up team, no helicopters, no equipment other than what they carry in their packs. It’s the purist technique, roped together, and utterly dependent on each other’s skill. Simpson and Yates have guts, youthful arrogance and talent. And a dry English sense of humour. They clamber up icicles, dangle over 1,400m drops, and spend three hours making a mug of tea at -62C.

Making it to the top in three days, they run into blizzard weather and a treacherous ridge on their way down, where Simpson falls and shatters his leg – a veritable death sentence. A heroic battle for survival unfolds in which both men are faced with life or death decisions that test the human spirit to its limit.

8:30pm – Sunday, February 19 on ABC2

Sunday nights on ABC2 are the home of Sunday Best, an outstanding collection of game-changing and thought-provoking feature length documentaries. We’ve done the work to bring you the best must-see intelligent docos that are just 2 good to miss.

Put on your Sunday Best…

The cocaine trade of the 70s and 80s had an indelible impact on contemporary Miami. Smugglers and distributors forever changed a once sleepy retirement community into one of the world’s most glamorous hot spots, the epicenter of a $20 billion annual business fed by Colombia’s Medellin cartel. By the early 80s, Miami’s tripled homicide rate had made it the murder capital of the country, for which a Time cover story dubbed the city ‘Paradise Lost’.

With Cocaine Cowboys, filmmaker Billy Corben – whose first feature Raw Deal: A Question Of Consent, caused a sensation at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival – paints a dazzling portrait of a cultural explosion that still echoes as Hollywood myth. Composer of the original ‘Miami Vice’ theme, Jan Hammer, provides the score.

“Bullets fly and dead bodies drop like whacked weeds in this startling documentary about the bad old days of the Miami drug trade.” MTV “A hyperventilating account of the blood-drenched Miami drug culture in the 1970′s and 80′s, the movie overflows with cops and coroners, snitches and smugglers, reporters and importers.” – New York Times

8:30pm – Sunday, February 12 on ABC2

Sunday nights on ABC2 are the home of Sunday Best, an outstanding collection of game-changing and thought-provoking feature length documentaries. We’ve done the work to bring you the best must-see intelligent docos that are just 2 good to miss.

Put on your Sunday Best…

In 1976, Officer Robert Wood of the Dallas Police was shot five times at point blank range after pulling a car over to inform the driver to turn his lights on. Officer Wood was left to bleed to death on the roadside.

A few weeks later a 16-year-old boy named David Harris was arrested, having bragged about killing a cop to his friends. He then told police it wasn’t him, but a hitcher he’d picked up that day called Randall Adams. Adams was charged, convicted and sentenced to death. Harris went free, until he too, ended up on death row for another murder several years later.

Written and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Errol Morris, The Thin Blue Line is an investigation of this case, which examines the evidence and talks to the police, witnesses and both Adams and Harris. It’s a film that allows you to make up your own mind. Is Adams guilty? Were the police looking for a scapegoat.

Did Harris, not Adams, pull the trigger? Is there a motive for the murder of the policeman?

8:30pm – Sunday, January 29 on ABC2

Sunday nights on ABC2 are the home of Sunday Best, an outstanding collection of game-changing and thought-provoking feature length documentaries. We’ve done the work to bring you the best must-see intelligent docos that are just 2 good to miss.

Put on your Sunday Best…

When the U.S. Marines launched the biggest operation since the start of the war in Afghanistan, journalist Ben Anderson was with Bravo Company, which landed in Marjah before anyone else.

This stunning documentary covers the entire operation under extremely dangerous circumstances, following the Marines as the battle raged.

It’s an exceptional and unflinching portrait filmed in some of the toughest conditions imaginable, and it contains perhaps the most intense fighting footage ever caught on camera.

Because Anderson spent two months eating, sleeping, running and sweating alongside the Marines every step of the way, the access is intimate and unprecedented.

8:30pm – Sunday, January 29 on ABC2

Sunday nights on ABC2 are the home of Sunday Best, an outstanding collection of game-changing and thought-provoking feature length documentaries. We’ve done the work to bring you the best must-see intelligent docos that are just 2 good to miss.

Put on your Sunday Best…

When the U.S. Marines launched the biggest operation since the start of the war in Afghanistan, journalist Ben Anderson was with Bravo Company, which landed in Marjah before anyone else.

This stunning documentary covers the entire operation under extremely dangerous circumstances, following the Marines as the battle raged.

It’s an exceptional and unflinching portrait filmed in some of the toughest conditions imaginable, and it contains perhaps the most intense fighting footage ever caught on camera.

Because Anderson spent two months eating, sleeping, running and sweating alongside the Marines every step of the way, the access is intimate and unprecedented.

8:30pm – Sunday, January 22 on ABC2

Sunday nights on ABC2 are the home of Sunday Best, an outstanding collection of game-changing and thought-provoking feature length documentaries. We’ve done the work to bring you the best must-see intelligent docos that are just 2 good to miss.

Put on your Sunday Best…

In this new documentary from director Larry Charles (Borat, Seinfeld), comedian and TV host Bill Maher (Real Time with Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect) takes a pilgrimage across the globe on a mind-opening journey into the ultimate taboo: questioning religion.

Meeting the high and low from different religions, Maher simply asks questions, like ‘Why is faith good?’ ‘Why doesn’t an all-powerful God speak to us directly?’ and ‘How can otherwise rational people believe in a talking snake?’ For anyone who’s even a little spiritually curious, this divine entertainment will deepen your faith…in comedy!

8:30pm – Sunday, January 15 on ABC2

Sunday, 15 January 2012 Sunday nights on ABC2 are the home of Sunday Best, an outstanding collection of game-changing and thought-provoking feature length documentaries. We’ve done the work to bring you the best must-see intelligent docos that are just 2 good to miss.

Put on your Sunday Best…

Ambition, courage, envy, betrayal, disaster, triumph…in other words a classic study of politics.

Politics is a bruising business. The best policies in the world mean nothing unless you’ve got the numbers.

Rats in the Ranks takes a behind-locked-doors look at how politicians get the numbers. Every September Sydney’s Leichhardt Council elects its mayor. Incumbent Larry Hand is popular with the citizenry but they don’t vote for mayor, the 12 councillors do and after three years of Larry some of them are after his job.

Rats in the Ranks screened at many film festivals and won the Silver Plaque for Social/Political Documentary at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1996 and the Critics Choice Award for Documentary at the Sydney Film Festival that same year and took home the Logie Award for most outstanding documentary series/program in 1998.

8:30pm – Sunday, January 8 on ABC2

Sunday nights on ABC2 is the home of Sunday Best, an outstanding collection of game-changing and thought-provoking feature length documentaries. We’ve done the work to bring you the best must-see intelligent docos that are just 2 good to miss.

Put on your Sunday Best…

In his short career, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a phenomenon. He became notorious for his graffiti art under the moniker ‘Samo’ on the Lower East Side in the late 1970s, sold his first painting to Deborah Harry for $200, and became best friends with Andy Warhol. Appreciated by both the art cognoscenti and the public, Basquiat was launched into international stardom. However, his cult status soon began to overshadow the art that had made him famous in the first place.

In this definitive documentary, director Tamra Davis pays homage to Basquiat her friend and Basquiat the icon. His dense, neoexpressionist work emerged in a world where minimalist, conceptual art was the fad.

And though he took the art world by storm, as a successful black artist he was constantly confronted by racism from many in that world. Much can be gleaned from insider interviews and archival footage, but it is Basquiat’s own words and work that powerfully convey the mystique and allure of both the artist and the man.