reality TV 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...

One of the more fascinating films that premiered at this year's Tribeca Film Festival was Live! Written and directed by Bill Guttentag and starring Eva Mendes, Live! is a fictional narrative that follows the behind-the-scenes of a reality show's struggles to make it on the air. What's different about this show versus anything that's currently airing on TV is that its premise is incredibly daring. Basically, six people compete for a chance to win $5 million. There's one gun, one bullet and each person holds the gun to their head and pulls the trigger. Survive, and you win the money. Not only is the show itself risky, but the film's main character (as played by Eva Mendes) is a ballsy network executive who's convinced our nation is ready for something like this. On the other hand, she also wants to be the one responsible for making television history. Essentially, we hate her for supporting this type of show -- but at the same time, we wind up rooting for her to succeed.

For Guttentag, this is his first feature narrative as a director. In the past, he's directed episodes of the hit HBO documentary series America Undercover, as well as Law & Order: Crime and Punishment and one of the more recent controversial docs, Nanking. Basically, if anyone should be directing a film like this, it's him. I recently sat down with Bill to talk to him about the film, how it came about and whether he thinks a show in which real people play a game of Russian Roulette on live television could ever exist. Check it out:

Cinematical: Realistically, in your opinion, do you see a show like this ever existing?

Bill Guttentag: The film is, of course, a satire. But like any satire, you don't want to go completely out there with something that will never happen; you want to go a little bit farther than what would be out there.

Cinematical: This is your first narrative feature as a director. Talk about how the project came together; what about this idea sparked your interest?

BG: I'd been a showrunner for a show called Law & Order: Crime and Punishment, and I've been to a lot of network meetings where a lot of crazy stuff happens. I thought to myself that this would be some pretty good stuff to build a film around -- coupled with the fact that it would allow me to address a comment that I really want to make; one that the events from the last few weeks have tragically pointed out. And that is that we're a nation obsessed with guns. This is a gun culture, and I think the country pays an enormous price for that kind of culture. So this was something I thought was important; something I wanted to comment on.

• Christa McAuliffe: Reach For The Stars - Massachusetts native Christa McAuliffe has become quite inseparable from the image of the ghastly tendrils of smoke hanging over the Florida sky after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1986, but she's also remembered as a schoolteacher who never stopped teaching. It is this second image on which first-time filmmakers Renée Sotile and Mary Jo Godges focus, going beyond blindly reverent fluff and digging into the humanity that made the loss of McAuliffe and the subsequent grounding of the Shuttle so much of a tragedy. With a warm, comforting narration by Susan Sarandon and a note-perfect song track by Carly Simon (whose tapes McAuliffe brought aboard Challenger), the film captures the spirit of exploration and discovery through McAuliffe's example, and not by just stating she was a shining star we should all try hard to emulate.
 

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!