ED-TV (55)

Directed by: Ron Howard

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Jenna Elfman, Woody Harrelson, Ellen DeGeneres

The Pitch: An amiable, none-too-bright young man agrees to be the 'star' of a reality show, having his life filmed by TV cameras 24 hours a day.

Theo Sez: You gotta feel for Ron Howard : here he is making yet another sturdy, thoughtful, no-frills entertainment, and he happens to make it on the hot topic du jour - the confluence of TV and reality, an object of desire for media mavens and Ph.D theses everywhere ; and, inevitably, its simple virtues look like liabilities. It ends up saying that TV is a Bad Thing, which may well be true - but it's so much more thrilling and post-modern to say something like "Everything's TV nowadays" or "Reality is just a construct". Reality gets a lot of respect here - it's the kind of sensible, down-to-earth film that takes pains to make its premise plausible - which is both its strength and its limitation : it makes a lot more sense (for example) that a show should attract sponsors by simply reserving a portion of the screen for advertisements rather than by having Truman Burbank's friends shout out irrelevant product-placements, but it's also a lot less memorable. Its premise is we live in a society where everybody wants to be on TV (it ends on a bunch of kids clowning around for the benefit of a security camera), but it's used as a theme to be illustrated rather than a springboard - and Howard's TV style doesn't help at all, making the film indistinguishable from what it's supposed to be targeting. Still quite intelligent, making a couple of worthwhile points (that, e.g., our heroes use TV as well as being used by it), well-structured and emotionally gripping, with gratifyingly hissable villains (kudos to Rob Reiner, as the slimiest executive probably since his own slimeball in POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE) ; plus, of course, pairing McConaughey and Harrelson as goofy white-trash brothers is right up there in the annals of Inspired Casting (Siblings Division) with Julia Roberts and Kyra Sedgwick as golden-tressed wildcats in SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT.