Word: minahan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even during his college days, it was clear that Gregory A. Minahan ’76 was headed for a life on the stage...
Everyone's well-played blandness and unquestioning acceptance of the game's rules are this film's sharpest satirical shaft. Of course Minahan is grateful that Survivor has come along, in effect, to validate an idea he's been nursing for five years. But he thinks the show is pretty small potatoes--nothing more than "mean-spirited office politics being played out on TV." Despite that send-up, Minahan, a onetime producer for the MTV tabloid show Buzz, is an avid viewer of reality TV. "It brings out the worst in everyone. It's exploitative, manipulative, it encourages narcissism...
...this guy cool, or what? A hotter approach to filmmaking comes from John Herzfeld, writer-director of 15 Minutes, which takes its title from Andy Warhol's famous formulation about fame in the age of television. Like Minahan, Herzfeld has worked at TV's scuzzier levels (he once made a docudrama about Joey Buttafuoco), and his project was passed around even longer (eight years) before getting a green light. But unlike Minahan, who finds celebrity and greed "not very interesting," he's "fascinated by our culture's most volatile obsessions--celebrity, violence and wealth." His brutal but very well-made...
...definition, elude critical analysis, lawmaking, moral philosophy. They leave us sputtering, sure that something is wrong but puzzled about what can be done about it. Herzfeld, for example, is worried about his work's obvious bloodiness but says he wanted to show "that real violence has real consequences." Similarly, Minahan wonders, "Did I make a film about exploitation or an exploitation film...
...must wonder whether either film will achieve Minahan's stated goal of making the audience "look at television, re-examine their desire to watch and what they watch." It may be that some of the audience, applying irony to reality shows and their own guilty pleasure in watching them, is more like Minahan the devoted viewer than Minahan the earnestly questioning filmmaker. These edgy films at least remind us that our sleazy, cheesy pop culture relies on our complicity, our indolence and passivity, to do its deadening work...