Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind
There can be little doubt in even the most reasonable minds that the most putrid form of entertainment today is that of the so called âreality showâ, a concept and format that allows for real life people (and celebrities) who are so desperate and starved for attention to go on camera and essentially humiliate themselves all while being exploited by a writer (called a âproducerâ on set) who likes to set up and stage the various on camera incidents so that they can air it on TV and make themselves big money while paying the unlucky participants a mere pittance just so they can say that they were âon TVâ after signing a release form that guarantees them little to no money. Documentaries they are most certainly not either as most often they even shoot scenes out of sequence as they would in a movie or TV show! While the phenomenon exploded in the 1990s, the one person whom many (including himself) would give credit for inventing the genre is Chuck Barris, a huckster TV game show producer who fast talked his way up the ladder before selling the major networks on the various concepts which he had created with the one thing that all these âgame showsâ had in common was in the singular humiliation and embarrassment of its so called âcontestantsâ for meager prizes that were hardly worth anything even back then. His grandest creation will forever be The Gong Show, a legitimately entertaining circus of a talent show where a trio of C list celebrities would stand in judgment over a bevy of mostly terrible performers upon whom anyone of them could get the bomb dropped on them at any time simply by having one of the celebrity judges slam a giant gong behind them that would cause the hook to come on out and sweep them off the stage until the next act, all of which was presided over by Barris himself, doing very little to hide his plastered, shitfaced demeanor on camera while acting as a wobbly Master Of Ceremonies. American TV audiences came to know Barrisâ name and face very well at that point, but there was a darker truth to the man it would seem as he actually had such a deep level of loathing for other people (and himself) that he apparently had INTENDED to create game shows where the viewing objective was to watch other ordinary people get lambasted and treated like shit and he also (while obviously fueled on cocaine) harbored even darker fantasies than that which he would relate in a book he wrote that later was adapted for this 2002 movie directed by George Clooney. Indeed, whatever Clooneyâs motives were (being a deep seated Hollywood liberal who at least displays a better sense of humor than most of his peers do) in adapting this novel by Barris (a Republican) in which the said author claimed that all the accounts within were true when they could have just as well been over the top mental masturbation fantasies about him killing people for The U.S. Government is where there seems to be a conflict as Clooney might have actually been going for making a statement on how America goes too far in trying to dictate world policy (albeit in a satirical sense) while Barris was just trying to exploit how his traumatic childhood, possible heavy drug use and preconditioned mental illnesses led to him living in a constantly paranoid, delusional state of mind of the highest order. Ironically, Barris himself had already written, directed and starred in his own theatrical movie version of his lifeâs story, that being 1976âs infamous Gong Show Movie, playing himself as a delusional crazy man in a theatrical release that stunned what few audience members actually went to see it by being such a dark, self destructive (as opposed to zany), autobiographical piece by a man whom at the time was at the absolute pinnacle of his career in television. Clooney managed to gather together a few of the old Gong Show regulars (The Unknown Comic, Jaye P. Morgan, Gene Gene The Dancing Machine) along with none other than Dick Clark to contribute documentary style interviews on the filmâs main subject (and Barris himself cameoing at the end looking none the worse for wear), but the movie itself is solidified by the casting of Sam Rockwell as Barris, cementing himself on the A list by crafting a wholly believable performance as a guy who gets so whacked out of his mind by his own success that maybe just maybe he starts thinking that he can do just about anything that he pleases (including kill people).  He is approached by a mysterious operative (who might very well be a completely imaginary friend similar to Drop Dead Fred, William Hurt in Mr. Brooks or half of the main cast of Beautiful Mind) played by Clooney himself who tells Barris that he is being recruited by the government to be a freelance, independent contract assassin simply because he âfits the profileâ (whatever that is) but first is sent to a training camp to learn the fundamentals of killing people (which contradicts conventional wisdom that most assassins are taken out of the rank and file of the U.S. Armed Forces after theyâve at least already learned how to fire a gun as opposed to a civilian TV producer). From there itâs off on various missions (while still running his various game shows) and meeting up with other contacts played by Julia Roberts and Rutger Hauer before killing various human beings with the only motivation for him being that the Clooney character says that The American Government wants them dead, again hinting at the possibility of Clooney as director attacking and criticizing the American policy of interfering in the affairs of other countries (one which has always been reviled by those on the Left). Eventually Clooney appears (as he always does seemingly out of the blue although nobody else ever seems to see him which reinforces the âimaginary friendâ idea) to tell Barris that there is now a mole within the agency killing the other assassins and that he should now watch his back, making him even more paranoid than before (even pulling a gun on The Unknown Comic!) before completely collapsing mentally and physically and barricading himself inside a cheap New York City hotel room, even growing out his beard and prancing around naked as if he were Howard Hughes. But is all this funny or even insightful?  Well, Clooney does try very hard to make it all watchable, employing darkened shadows to portray Barrisâ train wreck of a personal life, bright colors when he is seen working on The Gong Show or The Dating Game and an almost psychedelic aura when showing his high pitched CIA assassin fever dreams, but it is Rockwellâs tour de force performance that carries the show here, playing a guy who strived to make as much money and screw as many women as he possibly could only to find that instead of celebrating his fame, success and financial rewards, he was such an inherent nihilist that he just simply cracked up mentally (although the aforementioned possibility of acute cocaine abuse is never shown), never fully recovering but at least pulling himself together enough to reconcile his insane secret agent fantasies (the final showdown with Roberts is a doozy) and using his fortune to get his life just the way he wants it. Clooneyâs character on the other hand might not so much be imaginary as he is rather a sinister doppleganger of Barrisâ, always telling him (himself?) what he wants to hear and knowing intricate details about Barrisâ past that even the government itself would have no way of knowing about. The only drawback here is Drew Barrymore as Barrisâ on again, off again girlfriend, intended to be written and portrayed as easygoing but coming off in Barrymoreâs hands as being completely vacuous and annoying instead (itâs so sad to see that Hollywood never really got the hint that Barrymore is not nearly as attractive and appealing as they seem to think she is). Still, in a cast with a lot of big names on hand, itâs still thankfully Rockwellâs show and just as Chuck Barris managed to turn the silly fun of a game show into a grotesque freak show (just as reality TV turned a large portion of popular entertainment into the same thing), so is Barrisâ own life (fictionalized as it is here with real events mixed in) exactly the same, even as the least of his tragedies involved hallucinating about killing people and having TV shows canceled since he also lost his only daughter to a drug overdose (not mentioned in this movie) which all makes for mesmerizing proof that living The American Dream might just go to your head so badly it could possibly explodeâŚ
8/10