Live!

Documentary filmmaker Bill Guttentag’s stale satire Live! sat unreleased for a few years before getting sent to DVD last month, and it dates itself by referencing the “26 share” of the now-faltering franchise Survivor. No matter—the cardboard sets and bullet-point hectoring of Live! would feel out of date in any era. Eva Mendes plays Katy, an ambitious TV executive who pitches a Russian roulette reality show to bolster her network’s low ratings. There’s some faint potential in the idea, but Guttentag takes the annoyingly obvious faux-doc route, and the end result is a lot of repetitive monologuing about morality and the media. Mendes’ ballsy TV exec is traced directly from Faye Dunaway in Network, but Live! doesn’t have a fraction of the satiric potency of Sidney Lumet’s classic, or even of EdTV, for that matter.