Beyond the Multiplex

Eva Mendes preens and flirts, Marilyn style, at the opening of her outrageous new film. Plus: Werner Herzog as ... "The German"!

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Katy Courbet (Eva Mendes) in "Live!"

May 2, 2007 | NEW YORK -- Sometimes you see celebrities out in public acting bored, like they're somehow too cool for the crowds of gawkers and photographers -- and, ahem, deeply serious film reporters, watching only for sociological purposes -- that define them as celebrities in the first place. Not so Eva Mendes, who turned up the other night for the premiere of her new film "Live!" at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Mendes did not act as if she were mildly repulsed by the whole enterprise, or pretend to be internally debating the chapter of Kierkegaard she had just read. Maybe it's because Mendes is 33, and after years of "Children of the Corn V" and "Urban Legends: Final Cut" she's finally a movie star, and she has been around the block enough times to understand that it won't last forever. Whatever the reason, girlfriend was working that red carpet. She strutted and preened and blew kisses, Marilyn style. She playfully smoothed out the fabric of her dress so her, er, figure would show itself off better. She leveled her dazzling eyes and dazzling teeth on each of us for a moment as she passed. My 1.9 seconds with Eva were special. I understand that there may be other guys in her life. But whatever else happens, we'll always have 8:17:04 p.m.

It was like being in the middle of a lightning storm. The pack of paparazzi opened its insectlike compound eyes and sprang into action: A star who acts like one! One who has decided to treat this parasitic exercise, this tightrope walk across a chasm of bottomless vapidity, as if it were actually fun! Mendes has a similar effect on "Live!" a mendacious but entertaining reality-show spoof that strives to be high-minded even as it wallows in the worst kinds of TV fantasy. It seems much funnier and meatier than it has any reason to be, and that's largely because Mendes attacks the movie and eats it whole, without mussing a thread of her form-fitting haute couture outfits.

"Live!" follows Katy Courbet (Mendes), head programmer of a fictional network called ABN, as she prepares to produce the latest innovation in reality TV: a live Russian-roulette tournament with a loaded gun and checks for $5 million awaiting those who pull the trigger and survive. It pains me to report this, but "Live!" belongs to that most tedious of 21st century genres, the mockumentary. See, it's purportedly being made by Rex (David Krumholtz), a shaggily earnest film school type, as a ruthless exploration about Katy's quest to kill somebody on the air for a better Nielsen share. The only purpose to this structure, it seems, is to let us watch Katy zipping her sheath skirt as she emerges from a ladies room stall (she respects Rex for his ruthlessness) and watch Rex gradually fall under her sway, intellectually and otherwise.

Katy seems to wear different fabulous designer ensembles in every shot, let alone every scene, and Mendes plays her as a prowling feline predator, or perhaps a shape-shifting Circean enchantress. She's smarter than anybody gives her credit for being, and tougher than anybody who has ever been born. She knows what Rex wants before he wants it; she knows what we all want, and she's going to make sure we get it. It's not even quite true that Katy thinks it's OK to show people shooting themselves in the head on TV. (She holds secret doubts, as it turns out.) It's more like she sees the Manifest Destiny of television, and grasps that morality, hers and anybody else's, is completely beside the point.

Writer-director Bill Guttentag delivers all this in the slick, bright colors it demands, and he certainly gets credit for writing this bigger-than-life villain. (When her boss tells her that the idea of seeing somebody die on the air gave him a hard-on, her first instinct is to check out his lap to see if it's still there.) For about the first hour, as Katy fights against the network suits and the Federal Communications Commission's lawyers to bring her misshapen mutant baby to life, "Live!" has all the hyperbolic meanness that was pretty much lacking from Jake Kasdan's similarly themed "The TV Set" (which premiered here last year).

Then Guttentag makes a crucial strategic error, expending tremendous energy on actually showing us the premiere episode of Katy's game show (itself called "Live!"), in which six stage-managed, "Real World"-style contestants -- their up-close-and-personal segments queued and ready to go -- spin around on a set built to look like a revolver's chamber, waiting for their appointment with destiny. It's gruesome, but it isn't really satire because reality TV cannot be satirized. Except for its premise and its climactic moment, Katy's show is less lurid than a lot of stuff that has really been on the air over the past seven or eight seasons.

Second, this shifts the focus from the film's only magnetic personality to the game show's assemblage of bogus contestants: the surfer dude, the struggling farmer, the former cheerleader, the buppie, the gay kid from a tough neighborhood. The only one who's interesting is the only one who'd never get cast in the real world: the onetime fashion model turned feminist performance artist. Finally the movie gets swallowed up by its subject matter, becoming exactly the kind of vicious spectacle it supposedly abjures. We're hypnotized for the same reason the film's fictional booboisie audience is hypnotized: We want to see which of these suckers will actually be sacrificed for us.

Tribeca screenings of "Live!" have been packed, and I don't doubt that somebody's going to acquire it or that a wider public will pay to see it, partly for the outrageousness of the premise (which Guttentag hasn't thought through as well as he might) but mostly for Mendes' dominating femme-fatale performance. Nonetheless, it's a pretty classic Tribeca problem film: It has one sensational asset and some decent material, but the reasons why it's not premiering at a more prestigious festival -- and why its commercial ceiling will probably be pretty low, in the end -- are evident.

Next page: Woody Harrelson, Ray Romano and Werner Herzog ham it up!