RealityTv Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Well, leave it to the comedy duo of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay to remind me of one of the better B-movie curios sitting on my shelf, a film that even combines their own site's merits of 'funny' and 'die' into one sharp satire that's already gone overlooked and underappreciated since its 2001 release (into a whopping ten theaters, it seems).

Series 7: The Contenders plays like a 90-minute marathon of a supposed TV show in which contestants are chosen at random and tasked with killing the competition. Everyday citizens have to take out other everyday citizens while the cameras are rolling, and the last man or woman standing wins, plain and simple.

It's funny in the ways it dead-on skewers the manipulations and absurdity of reality programming, and it's funny in more bleakly matter-of-fact ways as we grow slowly but surely engaged by the characters, just as the show itself would intend to. Besides, in what other movie would you see Paul Giamatti's mom from Sideways and the girl from the well in The Silence of the Lambs duke it out, with Will Arnett narrating throughout? Now that's something I would watch...

Insert painfully unfunny "Not Home Alone anymore" joke ... here. In just about the saddest child star gone wrong news I've ever heard, word on the street is has it that an apparently cash-strapped Macaulay Culkin has signed on to join Anna Nicole Smith and Dennis Rodman in a British "celebrity" version of reality hellhole, Big Brother. As if the very fact that Culkin has, at 25, already given up on legitimate success wasn't bad enough, a source involved with the production of the show told a British tabloid that Culkin was primarily asked to be on the show in the hopes that he'd dish the dirt on his sometime best friend ... yes, that's right ... Michael Jackson.

"This is a great coup for us," the source told the Daily Star. "Because of his friendship with Michael Jackson, you're almost getting two for the price of one." It gets worse: the Channel 4 source admits that the network was "desperate to bag Macaulay because we want some big name Americans who will be controversial and have a chequered history...But more importantly he has been privy to Jacko's private world at Neverland."

When D-listers debase themselves on reality television, I'm usually the first to point and laugh (oh, how I crave a Season Two of Breaking Bonaduce). But just a couple of years ago, when he was starring in Party Monster and Saved!, it looked like Macaulay had a decent shot at a merit-based comeback. How did he get from there, to selling out Michael Jackson on trash British television? The mind reels. 

Mira Sorvino was made deputy sheriff of Lackawanna County, PA yesterday, as part of a ceremony that, as Rush & Malloy tell it, seems to have been primarily intended to fill the spank banks of the local officers. Whilst the township's real sheriff is all a drool ("[Sorvino] would be a nice addition to the force," John Szymanski said. "She's a very beautiful young lady") he makes it clear that the honor doesn't really mean anything. A deputy sheriff, Szymanski says, doesn't have "any police powers." But as Sorvino's father, actor Paul Sorvino, tells the gossipmongers, that hasn't stopped him from fighting all kinds of crime. Sorvino, who was made deputy sheriff of Scranton in 1982, says, "I know I've stopped at least two robberies...Another time, I saw a guy driving in a very dangerous way. I followed him for 5 miles and called it in...Whenever I can help, I do."

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Somebody call the producers of COPS – we need to pitch a Sorvino Family Crime Stoppers reality show, stat!