Barring a Stephen Soderbergh wonkfest about how James Holzhauer money-balled “Jeopardy” before our eyes, the game show movie may actually be a dead genre—a Hollywood relic about a time when more people ogled the same network entertainment.
But this week on Be Reel—for the 25th anniversary of Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show”—we look back at a trio of game show movies to see what they claim about mass media, the gamification of life, and the thrill of watching someone allegedly just like us take the house for everything it’s worth.
Though unsuccessful in its 1994 awards bids (and seemingly a permanent resident of Netflix these last five years; it’s still streaming there), “Quiz Show” finds its strongest qualities in fascinating performances from Ralph Fiennes and John Turturro, playing two game show contestants from different walks of New York. It’s a saga of white privilege and corporate malfeasance based on the real-life “The $64,000 Question,” a CBS smash hit from the late ’50s most famous for its cheating scandal.
Then, Noah and I advance into a bonus round containing “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008) and “The Running Man” (1987), two game show movies of a different kind, which raise questions like:
- What does Danny Boyle’s wholesale commitment to the artifice of “Slumdog Millionaire” reveal about the film’s 2008 Oscar win and the Best Picture winners that followed?
- What problems of global ignorance should one movie have to answer for?
- Where does “The Running Man” rank in the pantheon of shameless Arnold Schwarzenegger one-liner parades?
- Where do all three of our movies this week land on the issue of television: idiot box or unity bringer?
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