Ray Pride

Daniel Minahan's "Series 7," which might also be dubbed "American's Most Hunted," or "When Good Ratings Go Bad," is a stirring satire of reality television, a pre-"Survivor" Sundance Lab-developed script about a television show in which seven good citizens are selected (unbeknownst to them), have weapons and a list of adversaries forced on them, and are followed by a camera crew through their stalk-and-kill paces.

Funny, authentic to the inauthentic devices used to hype human drama on TV, and even touching in spots, boasting a magnificently cranky lead performance by Brooke Smith as the returning ten-kills-in-two-tours champion, the hugely pregnant Dawn; it's grandly savage. While the antagonist of the piece seems to be a self-righteous nurse named Connie, of whom the 37-year-old Minahan notes, "The interesting thing about this is that most people think that Connie is the villain of the piece, but I think really that the producers are the villains of the movie. You just don't see them."

The world of "Series 7" does manage to parody myriad other forms of video, including wedding footage, a mortifying college-Goth video for Joy Division's gloom-anthem "Love Will Tear Us Apart," surveillance footage, helicopter car chase footage. "Those were all tools, true to the form," Minahan says, having learned many of the techniques working on such shows, and bringing in a professional promo editor to cut the film's zippy segment wraparounds. "The imaginary show we created was a hybrid of so many television styles. As I adapted the script into this one program, I kept trying to find means to tell a thing. Oh, that's a music video, and so on. Much like they would on a tabloid show." There are also glittering moments of emotion and even lyricism. One sequence finds Dawn declaiming about how she despises finding herself hunted -- reminiscent of a speech from Carson McCullers' "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter": "Most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many."

Minahan takes a moment to think. "I collected so many different texts when I was researching. I think that might have come from some how-to-prevent-a-stalker [text]. I read a lot of things about stalkers. Maybe [those lines] were from some self-defense manual." The first assembly of the film, before the jokey sizzle of the commercial breaks, ran a little over two hours, he says, but "It was very dark. It was very sad. And realistic!" He laughs. "Realistic!" He laughs again.

(2001-03-22)

Also by Ray Pride

MANNY FROM HEAVEN
In Manny Farber's essential omnibus, "Negative Space," Farber says, "I can't imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can't imagine anything more valuable to do, and I've always felt that way." Yes -- and if one could say it as witheringly, as wisely and wittily as Manny Farber.
(2001-03-08)

RAINSTORMS OF WORDS
There's a lovely gift of language and love on every page of "The Element of Lavishness," a collection of a forty-year correspondence between New Yorker magazine editor and short story writer William Maxwell and British writer Sylvia Townsend Warner.
(2001-03-01)

MEET JOE BLOW
In "The Mexican," Pitt co-stars as Jerry, a hapless criminal and diffident bag man who must repay one last debt before he can accede to demands that he quit from girlfriend Samantha (Julia Roberts), an always-agitated therapy-speak bitch.
(2001-03-01)

KNOWING DICK
While Jessica Villines' keen, sidelong portrait of Cynthia is chockfull of diverse interviews with the likes of artist Ed Paschke and Camille Paglia defending Cynthia's pursuits, her dentist, Dr. Michael Feinberg, shares the keenest insight. Artists have fixated on features of the human form throughout history; Rodin liked hands, Cynthia Plaster Caster admires rocker's cocks.
(2001-02-22)

CROUCHING PRODUCER, HIDDEN EGO
(2001-02-22)

HANNIBAL THE AMICABLE
(2001-02-08)

WATERY, GRAVE
(2001-02-08)

SLIPPERY SLOPES
(2001-02-01)

SLY CONCEPT
(2001-01-25)

GUY STUFF
(2001-01-18)

CINE-MAGIC!
(2001-01-18)

KIDS IN TULSA
(2001-01-11)

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