An Excellent Movie!

Rating: 10/10 (27 May 2005)

Are game shows really rigged? I remember watching this week that "Jeopardy!" ace Ken Jennings who won $2 Million last year from seventy-four games, lost to another opponent in which throughout the final games, Ken wasn't the same as he would answer quickly in previous games, but would make goofy faces as he loses. In Robert Redford's film, we discover how the producers of NBC's Twenty-One rigged every contestant on the show where eventually somebody would find out.
The name of the game is Twenty-One and like "Jeopardy!" itself, the game show has various categories from history, science, math, movies, etc., and the champion is Herb Stempel (gifted actor John Turturro) a Jew living in Brooklyn who has won over various tournaments with a winning streak of over $100,000 where he knows all of the commercials by heart, and is being bribed by producer Dan Enright (David Paymer) so that way the show can get a new contestant who is better looking and not that hideous to TV viewers.
During interviews for contestants, a pretty boy WASP teacher name Charles Van Doran (Ralph Finnees) tries out for the quiz show Tic-Tac-Dough were Enright tries to get Van Doran into the show Twenty-One to beat Stempel, and decides to go through with it, just because Enright B.S'd the cause of education to him.
Now after Van Doran has beaten Stempel, Redford shows the audiences the ups and down of a successful individual having fame, getting the answers from the producers, and losing the persona he once had.
Attorney Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow, another gifted actor) reads Stempel's article about Twenty-One being rigged, so now Goodwin is investigating whether the incident is true or not and if Van Doran is being fed the answers from Enright instead of looking the answers by himself.
"Quiz Show" is not just a movie, but a document on what goes on the inside of a game show where the next time you watch a game show, you ask yourself: Are these people actually smart, or are they just being fed answers like everybody else? Are game shows discriminative towards people of genders and races? Or for the matter, is Ken Jennings really smart, or did Alex and the gang from "Jeopardy!" feed him the answers and later played him a fool?