criterionforum.org

Oscilloscope Laboratories presents REALITY, the newest film by Matteo Garrone (director of Criterion's GOMORRAH). REALITY is now playing in Los Angeles and New York, and will roll out to theaters nationwide in the weeks to come.

Garrone's much-anticipated followup to GOMORRAH, REALITY follows one humble fishmonger in Naples whose desire to become a contestant on the reality television show "Big Brother" leads him down a rabbit hole of skewed perception and paranoia.

O-Scope and Criterion Forum are giving away an autographed REALITY poster (signed by Matteo Garrone) and any Oscilloscope Blu-ray or DVD release of your choosing. For your chance to win, let us know in the thread below your favorite film that focuses on television or "television culture." Please keep responses to five sentences max and one response per person.

Contest will end at 11:59 PM PST on March 29th, 2013. The winner will be chosen and announced on this thread shortly thereafter.

To watch the trailer for REALITY and for a list of theaters, please visit our site:
http://www.oscilloscope.net/reality/

Tootsie would be number one on my list!

A Face in the Crowd, Eliza Kazan's oft-forgotten masterpiece that's all kinds of bitter and prescient.

My Favorite Year, a behind the scenes at a TV variety show set during the 1950's.

I'd say Videodrome- I've never seen TV look so attractive, especially in a movie.

This is a bit of a weird one, but Godard's Nr. 2 is a delight in how it filters his own past through the dead eyes of television suggesting that his cinema could never speak amongst people again. Retelling his cinematic birth is a rather daring proposition that by all logic Godard would not be interested in at this point in his career and the end result reflects that well with a disinterest even in the mechanics of character. Yet this is precisely what works to the film's advantage for Godard must be separated from what he is experiencing to accurately paint how the audience is totally disengaged from their surroundings. The epic theater is no more as quotations have lost their interruption meaning resulting in a quality lacking in history. This loss of the past ultimately I think is the meaning of Godard's post Wave work which through the artifice and isolation of the home and its viewing systems is perfectly and sadly summarized here.

Being There:

Hal Ashby's film version of Jerzy Kosinski's book of a simpleton who's only knowledge of the world is through television predates Forest Gump, The Truman Show and Man Facing Southeast. Peter Sellers was robbed of the Oscar for his performance as Chauncey Gardener, a man who never ventured outside the house of the wealthy industrialist for whom he worked as gardener until his employer dies. Because Chauncey Gardner is television, he is a blank slate (or mirror) that reflects the views, desires & agendas of everyone he encounters back on to themselves....Chauncey Gardener embodies the theses laid out in cultural critiques like The Culture Of Narcissism, The Medium Is The Message & Amusing Ourselves To Death.

" I like to watch." - Chauncey Gardner

Triple Bill: Tootsie, Network, Broadcast News

Broadcast News: you can identify good people when before the harsh camera--they sweat.

UHF. Has there been a more devastating critique on the world of art and entertainment?

How about The Howling, specifically the ending where the intrepid investigating journalist:

Spoiler

proves that werewolves are real by transforming into a really cute and fluffy one during her television broadcast and gets shot down on live television! (Before the abrupt change to a Legend of Lylah Clare-reminiscent dog food commercial to try and restore some sense of normality!)

What a scoop, even if the nonplussed audience watching in a bar ironically presume it was all done with special effects!

Without a doubt... A Face in the Crowd

Requiem For a Dream: television as drug, and other drugs.

Are all of these responses so short because no one knows how to interpret "Please keep responses to give sentences max and one response per person"?

That's the situation for me. I believe normally it is three sentences, but just in case I kept mine to one.

Network is the one and only prophetic masterpiece that brilliantly satirizes TV culture.

Not really a film, but the episode of The Twilight Zone:What's in the Box.

Real Life, Albert Brooks' first (and best) film, is the last word in "TV culture" satire with an ending that's still devastating ("their house is really burning!").

The Model Couple (William Klein)
Obviously, it's remarkable to see a film anticipate "reality TV" this far back in the past, even beating Brooks's Real Life by a couple of years. But I think what makes the film so unique is that it's not a critique of "television culture" specifically but rather folds that into a satire of grandiose, centralized, institutionalized social projects that claim to enhance our understanding of, and our bonds to, each other but leave us isolated and powerless and ignore what our actual needs are. For me at least, the film is less a response to proto-reality television programs like An American Family than it's about our whole orientation toward technological/material/urban "progress" driven by pseudoscientific "research" about people's behavior and needs. But I don't want to make the film sound serious at all: it's rough, messy, and farcical enough to keep any rigid ideas from jelling that may have bogged down the experience.

PS The Nicholas Ray giveaway was five sentences max, so I'm sure that's what this one should have said as well.

Ginger e Fred, Federico Fellini. Maybe not one of his best films, but fun nonetheless.

That's supposed to be five sentences, guys!

For illuminating blind hero worship and the fetish-ization of tragedy in a manner both hilarious and moving, World's Greatest Dad. Although only one scene centers on television specifically, the film exposes the motivations of the culture that drives reality TV, and in the most extreme way depicts the "star's" loss of agency once picked up by the media current.

Haha, goddamnit. Ok:

Videodrome is a favorite largely because it takes pop philosophy from the otherwise fairly dull Marshall McLuhan and pushes it into something fascinatingly horrible, a metaphysical examination of the self vs the represented self. Which could likewise be fairly boring, but Cronenberg makes it visceral, infusing his fascination with the flesh into questions of what it means to be beyond flesh, and thereby reinforcing the technological alienation TV was seen to epitomize. Sure, that means that his characters are fucking TVs, growing guns out of their chests, and getting tortured to death, but the imagery could very easily fall into gross for the sake of being gross; Cronenberg's coherent, if complex, philosophical viewpoint keeps the fever dream readable without being merely representational.

If horror movies are in general about the return of that which is repressed, Videodrome is a romance about horror, about falling in love with the transgression horror usually encodes. The punishment for this is also the reward: total integration into an inhuman system.

JFarnsworth wrote:That's supposed to be five sentences, guys!

Thanks, I went back and edited my thing to a more satisfactory amount.

The King of Comedy.