Reality Bites

Director: Daniel Minahan

Starring: Brooke Smith, Marylouise Burke, Glenn Fitzgerald

For better or worse, reality television is here to stay. Perhaps it's voyeurism, or perhaps Americans simply like their characters, well, more "real." Whatever the case, the bottom-line for network executives remains the same -- ratings -- and reality TV delivers them, in spades.

Director Daniel Minahan is no fan of reality TV, but as a former Fox News Network producer he possesses a keen understanding of our fixation with the live and the lurid. It's not surprising then that Minahan should be the one to take this concept to its logical extreme: a reality show where the contestants' goal is to hunt and kill their opponents. No getting voted off the island here folks, when you lose this game, you lose permanently.

Minahan calls this game "The Contenders" and his new film, Series 7, is nothing more than a marathon broadcast of the show's seventh season. What we learn about the series and its cast is limited to what its producers let us see, and what the players are willing to divulge about themselves during on-camera interviews. Nevertheless, we are quickly aware of the following: five involuntary participants (In Minahan's world, contestants don't try out for reality TV, they simply wake up one day to discover they're part of the program.) have been selected via a random drawing to challenge last season's champion Dawn Lagarto (Brooke Smith). If Dawn, who is eight months pregnant, survives the round (her third, indicating she has already successfully killed ten previous gamers), she and her expectant child are free to go. If she loses, well, there are always reruns.

For Dawn's final challenge, Contenders' producers have selected antagonists from her hometown of Newbury (really Danbury), Connecticut. As luck would have it, one of the players turns out to be her former high-school sweetheart, now besieged with testicular cancer. Others include a photogenic eighteen-year-old with stereotypically supportive suburban parents (They drop her off and pick her up from potential kill sites.), an aging recluse intent on informing the audience that "The Contenders" is really one giant government conspiracy (He's probably right.), a construction worker and father of three who spends more time (unsuccessfully) trying escape the game rather than win it, and a sixty-something year old nurse whose professional familiarity with mortality makes her a far more serious contender than her outward demeanor suggests. Predictably, Dawn and her ex-lover emerge as the game's final players. However, when the duo attempts to turn the tables on their captors, they learn that in future's most successful series, there is no departing from the script.

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