EDTV TALKING HORSE

I'm trying to catch up on the movies. I can say I am not alone when I say that it is difficult to keep on top of, not only films which are current, but digging through the thousand of archived films (from many years past) that I want to see; which are many.

A friend of mine passed me a rented DVD of the 1999 feature film, Edtv, with the prompt of, "Check this out; tell me what you think, it isn't very good".

He was right.

You could see what the filmmakers were trying to accomplish but it didn't work.

Matthew McConaughey was good but his on-screen brother, played by the Cheers guy, could have been played by anyone.

The story was overly rudimentary -- don't ask Hollywood to add layers of soil to the garden -- which only circumvented any comment on the idea of a television show following someone around in their day to day business. Showing is not commenting, necessarily. There is nothing stated or implied in this one other than "see how this would fuck up your life and those of your friends and relatives!"

(Even the talented Martin Landau is given a role more properly associated with a Farrelly brothers film.)

I was about twenty minutes into the film where I asked myself who directed Edtv. Oh, Ron Howard.

For someone who does have attributes like building a roster of some popular films, at the end of the day, Ron Howard is a very pedestrian director. I don't think he can handle topics where depth and dimension must be displayed.

I was surprised at the film's simple mindedness.