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Reviews
C'est arrivé près de chez vous (1992)
The Ugly Side of Truth TV
Man Bites Dog would have to fall under the category of the antithesis of Hollywood movies.
If you can purge the shocking undiluted violence and put enough comfortable distance between yourself and the show then viewing the film with a critical eye isn't hard at all.
That is, if you can do it.
Because Man Bites Dog is as harsh as reality comes, displaying the warped sense of what counts for normalcy for different people and weaving in underlying messages of where we are heading with the genre of reality TV.
The black and white footage, perhaps done to spare us gruesome details of massacre, effective does the complete opposite. Whatever immunity you have towards those Hollywood slash-fics will be speedily thrown out of the window within the first 10 minutes of the show.
It's not glamourised and in doing so, you actually start to believe what lengths people are capable of in the "Real" world.
So, if you look at it from the point of view that it bulldozes the message across... 'don't get in too deep before you start to realise you can't get out'... then with all surety, it is great enough a movie to shock viewers right into common sense.
However, it's not something I would recommend for anything beyond critique circles or research unless you find scrubbing your brain out with carbolic soap as a fun post-movie experience.
MacGyver: Pilot (1985)
Nifty Tricks In Tight Spots.
Like a true child of the mid 80s, I was glued to the television every week as early as 7 years-old, when MacGyver hit the shores in Malaysia. He didn't have the fancy gadgetry nor the suave ways to shimmy out of trouble most of the time and he did get into a *lot* of trouble.
What he did have most of the time was air and scrap wires and it suddenly they were the handiest tools ever. The man single-handedly popularised the trend of using coat hangers to get out of anything.
The cheesy 80s theme music was the perfect lid on the pot of the most inventive TV show ever.
It invented cool and if I could get one bit of my childhood back, it would most definitely be every Tuesdays at 8pm in front of the TV.