I liked it, glad I saw it. Not eager to watch it again only because I found it very realistic and therefore a sad actual view of our world full of haters or heartless-hypocrates.
The story: Cynthia (Ellen DeGeneres, very good) is a producer with a new idea for a new show: to film the life of a normal person 24 hours a day, no actors no script, no editing, all live on air. They send someone to film some auditions in pubs; Ed (Matthew McConaughey) is there with his brother Ray (Woody Harrelson) and a beer-holder around his neck. Ray auditions for it, and Ed is all ‘pick him’, but the studio people like him more. They talk to him, like him, and offer him a contract. From now on, people with cameras and microphones will follow him everywhere, at all times.
The first day it starts very low, but people start watching it out of curiosity. It soon gets more interesting, and people just want to watch ‘a few more minutes’, you know, just to ‘see what’s gonna happen’.
Ray is very loud, often goes too far, and everybody watching can see that his girlfriend Shari (Jenna Elfman) likes Ed more than him.
One day Ed knocks on Ray’s door and finds him with another woman, and of course Shari sees that live on telly, and is very upset. Ray begs Ed to talk to her and when he goes to see her, she’s angry and very upset and starts saying ‘what’s wrong with me?’ for always get into situations that hurt her, and Ed is very sweet, they kiss and confess that they always liked each other, and they’re kind of embarrassed by the cameras and Ed has a bit of doubts being that she went out with his brother, but I guess he likes her very much and so they kiss again… you can see the audience screaming when they kiss, so the studio likes this new development and Cynthia encourages Ed telling him that women like to be pursued, so he brings her flowers and asks her out.
It’s now ten days since the show started, and his face is everywhere, he’s become a big star. After a month, the studio tells him they want him to go on another month, and he’s over the moon happy to get all that money for his family. Everybody likes Ed because he’s the star of the show, but they turn nasty on Shari, saying things like ‘who does she think she is?’ (classic line for women against women, they so often say that, it’s really painful; if women were more supportive of each other the women situation in the world would be different), and also that he deserves better, as if they actually knew either of them. Shari can’t take all that, and leaves him because everybody hates her. Ed says ‘shame on you’ to the camera, to the people, but they don’t care. He reads the paper and there’s a list of women he should date instead of her :-/ Ed even appears in talk-shows (who’s that guy again? the talk-show host with the big face and the white-grey hair? I don’t remember).
Ed always thought that his dad walked out of his family when he was 12, but now dad comes back (Dennis Hopper) telling a different story, and this causes a bit of drama in the family when Ed presses his mother for the truth, saying she lied to him for twenty years. She had caught him cheating, forgiven him for a while, but she threw him out when she coupled with Al (Martin Landau, the funniest character of the movie).
When Ed sees that there are fixed cameras in his bedroom now, he sneaks out to go to Shari, to talk to her about his situation, and they start making out in his car when the cameramen arrive and she’s too embarrassed when her breasts appear on tv, so she leaves without saying goodbye or where she’s going. Ed is like ‘I did all I could’ , and seems ok, but still thinks of her, but the studio now wants him with the brunette model that approached him at a party, so Cynthia arranges for them to meet again.
The public likes Jill more than Shari, and they start going out like movie-stars, and everybody watches (even the President apparently) while they kiss and more; Jill is not at all troubled by the cameras, she seems to enjoy them a lot, but when they are about to have sex on her table, he falls down and lands on her cat. When help arrives, she seems more worried for the cat than for him, and that was actually the moment I like her best, I thought Oh she does have a heart :-p
60 days go by: Ray has written a book about Ed titled ‘my brother pissed on me’; Ed’s friend John - I heard Joel, but imdb says John … they’re probably right so I’ll keep the John - (Adam Goldberg) appears in talk-shows saying how in our society people don’t go on tv because they are special, but they just become special because they appeared on tv, which is so very true and unsettling, and yet unstoppable.
Both Ed and the cat are fine, but Cynthia wants to end the show, but her boss doesn’t.
When Ed receives a phone call saying that his father had a heart attack, he rushes to the hospital only to find out that it was his real father, he thought it was Al. The family doesn’t want him at the funeral because the cameras would follow him, and when Al goes to talk to him, there’s the sweetest scene of all, when Ed tells him “you are my father, Al” and he’s moved.
After all this, Ed wants to quit the show, but the boss doesn’t let him because the contract he signed says that he must go on for as long as they ask him to, and must lead a normal life or they might sue him.
Shari comes back and watches him from afar but he sees her and chase after her; they talk and kiss, but then Ed learns that now they’re not following just him, they follow his whole family, Shari included, with the idea of showing whoever of them has something interesting going on.
Ed is angry but can’t quit, so he comes up with an idea: let’s do the same to the producers, and asks his audience to come up with some secret about them that he’ll reveal in the show.
Cynthia quits her job, having had enough of her boss, and secretly phones Ed giving him embarrassing information on her boss. He reports every detail, and when he’s about to reveal the name the boss stops the show!
Ed is celebrating, that’s what he wanted of course, to get out of it, and everyone of them is happy, but the infuriating thing is that you see the public cheering too, as if they were happy for him, as if they were concerned for the bad situation he was in… and yet they were all watching the show… I mean, he wanted to quit, so if you cared and wanted the show to end, why keep watching? Because you wanted to see what was going to happen? Regardless of how much you were hurting him by doing so? I mean, no producer would keep the show running if there was nobody watching anymore, right? So, simple enough, to end the show just stop watching it!!
Anyway, the whole secret-revelation-thing seems like a desperate attempt to find an ending, because that wouldn't happen in real life, plus he had no way of knowing if the info was correct, and in real life he would have received so many phone calls from people simply curious, or wanting to talk to someone on tv, or claiming that they knew something important to feel important themselves but actually making it up... instead he only received that one call :-/
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