Quiz Show (1994)

This movie is really good. I like it a lot. Actually, it is extremely good, and I love it a lot. Quiz Show was released in 1994, and was directed by Robert Redford, a man who will have my ever-long respect as the creator of the Sundance Film Festival. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture for that year, but lost. And I would be sad about that, except that the movie that it lost to was Forrest Gump, a movie many believe are overrated (and they are wrong), but I find to be one of the greatest slices of cinema ever released. Also released that year were Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption, both of which who also lost to Forrest Gump. Now look me in the eye and tell me that 1994 wasn’t a good year (granted, I wasn’t alive in ’94, I’m just basing this off of the films I have seen from that year, which sadly, does not include Pulp Fiction). What’s so dang brilliant about Quiz Show is that it tells a story, tells it swiftly, and tells it effectively. Think The Social Network but about 50s game shows instead of Facebook. And I love The Social Network and this film for the same reasons. They’re both slick, informative, fun, extremely well-made, and just brilliant. But where as in The Social Network we have a young genius making a website, in Quiz Show we have the true story of a bunch of poor saps getting put into a fixed game show called Twenty-One. The contestants get the answers when they’re bringing in ratings, and forced to give the wrong ones when people find them unappealing. The film is simple enough, and goes from there. The movie is extremely well-acted, scripted brilliantly, and has beautiful direction by Redford. This movie is unnaturally well-made. I want to go and research this topic right now, maybe buy a book on the Twenty-One scandal. And for a boy who writes movie reviews on the free hours of the day, that’s saying something.
9/10