For those who haven’t seen it, “Quiz Show” is about the, um, quiz show scandals that rocked TV in 1958. America tuned in by the millions to watch “Twenty One,” sponsored by Geritol, the “fast-acting tonic, high-potency tonic that makes you feel stronger…fast.” Turns out the show were completely rigged, and it all comes crashing down…because of a snub.

Ralph Fiennes, fresh off Schindler’s List, plays Charles Van Doren, the latest sensation sweeping the nation. The son of noted poet and author, Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield), Charles teaches at Columbia University, and tries out for Tic-Tac-Dough on a whim. The producers, Dan Enright (David Paymer) and Albert Freeman (Hank Azaria), love him. He’s the answer to their prayers. See, the reigning champion is an odd character, equal parts dork and blowhard, a Queens’ native named Herbert Stempel (John Turturro).

Stempel sees everything as a conspiracy to keep him down – not because he’s a crass jerk, but because he’s Jewish. Attanasio gives Stempel some cringe-funny lines, like when he offers Goodwin a rugelach: Come on, they’re a Jewish delicacy. Before Toby eats it. While we don’t like Herbie, we empathize with him and feel his humiliation. We know he’s a blue collar guy because he watches professional wrestling. Word has come down from Geritol’s Martin Rittenhome (Martin Scorsese): Herbie no longer moves Geritol. The other major character is Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow), a Congressional Attorney who longs to make headlines with a big “collar.” Who better than TV?

The characters are wonderfully complex. Herbie’s supposed to be a whistleblower, but he cheated, too, a fact that breaks his wife Toby’s heart. Worse, he’s an attention whore who in the words of one character, has to be “dragged from the spotlight with his teethmarks still on it!” He believes Enright promised him a panel show, but when Enright doesn’t deliver, he goes after the show. Enright is a calculating, shrewd manipulator at every turn, compassionately sending Herbie to a psychoanalyst on his own dime, then offering the bill to Goodwin as proof of Herbie’s mental delusions.

On the other hand, Van Doren is a WASP all the way. He’s so WASP-y his family plays a Shakespeare quoting game. For fun. His dad doesn’t have a TV, has never seen the show, and thinks it’s a distraction from Charles’ teaching. But this never comes across as overbearing, there’s genuine love behind Mark’s desires for his son to succeed in Academia. He never condescends him about TV, it’s just a generation gap. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story, and the part that could have been both the most boring and the most clichéd.

On the surface, few people could relate to this elite family. They write “Happy Birthday, Father” on Mark’s birthday cake. Father! Did I mention they play a Shakespeare quoting game? For fun?! But Charles’ desire to make something of himself is very endearing, and Fiennes creates a character that we deeply like, even though we know he’s wrong. What I also love about the character is that he never wanted to cheat. When the idea is proposed to him, he rejects it before adding, “Was that a part of the test?”

For all his smarts, he is deeply naïve, wondering how they could cheat if the questions are locked in a bank vault. That the bank vault canard fooled the public and Charles speaks volumes about the naïve attitude Americans had concerning mass media at the time. Enright promises no cheating, “So pure, it floats,” he purrs. But Charles wins on a question he already got right in the audition. In the aftermath of his win, he’s swarmed with admirers. Herbie offers a hand in congratulation, but Charles doesn’t see him for the throng of people. Herbie walks away, feeling snubbed and vengeful. His rage intensifies when he hears someone remark, “Better to have a true intellectual than a freak with a sponge brain.” Thus begins Herbie’s obsession with taking down Charles Van Doren.

Charles becomes instantly intoxicated with all the attention he receives. Time magazine covers, Today Show appearances, and throngs of adoring fans. At one point, as a limo drops him off at school, he pretends to tie his show. In reality, he’s waiting for the classrooms to empty so he can be worshipped and adored on his way to his office. Later, with Goodwin bearing down, he calls Enright from a pay phone, and we see the adoring crowds starting to get under his skin. Before long, he avoids the crowds, asking the limo driver to drop him off behind the studio. But he remains likable, and is truly a good son: he gives his father a TV for his birthday. Mark tries to watch the show, but snaps off the TV, saying it’s too “nerve-racking,” Scofield’s voice cracking so believably on the line.

As Goodwin begins investigating Charles, they become sorta friends. Goodwin finds himself torn between his desire to fit in with this intellectual clique and his desire to bring down TV. Through exhaustive research, he discovers another player, a beatnik artist named Snodgrass appeared on the show months earlier. When he answered a question correctly, Jack Barry responded, “I’m sorry that’s – waitaminute!” Goodwin seeks him out. Snodgrass had mailed the questions to himself days before his appearance on the show. It’s the smoking gun he needs, and when he confronts Enright, we see the first crack in the producer’s armor. “Why would he do that?” he wonders aloud, before using the only arrow in his quiver – TV- meekly asking Goodwin “How would you like to be on a panel show?”

It all boils down to a hearing before a Congressional sub-committee. Charles is offered several chances to come clean, but he’s held steady to his word that there is no impropriety. Goodwin doesn’t want to hurt Charles. His wife tells him, “Putting the quiz shows on trial without Charles Van Doren is like putting on Hamlet without Hamlet,” adding, “You’re the Uncle Tom of the Jews.” Ouch. Attanasio’s dialogue is great, and the final exchange between Charles and Goodwin is amazing. Charles poses a hypothetical question to Goodwin: if someone offered you all this money to simply answer questions you knew the answer to, would you do it? Goodwin’s terse “No” sparks Charles to say, “And I would?”

Of course we know he would, but as for Goodwin, it’s easy to take the high road when the offer is purely hypothetical. As Charles feels the noose tightening, Freeman assures him, “Everybody knows the magician doesn’t saw the lady in half. This is show business.”

We know that this will be the final defense. But for Enright and Freeman’s dodging and denying, it might be a valid one. The cast is uniformly strong, but no one shines as bright as Scofield, playing arguably the movie’s only honorable character. We feel his hurt and shame as Charles confesses, and again when he learns Charles will be forced to resign from Columbia. His scenes with Fiennes are among the strongest in the film, like one where they share a slice of cake and Mark says, “Mother always said you were the actor in the family.” Wow. Fiennes effortlessly captures the infatuation, the intoxication, and ultimate disgust – with fame. His walk of shame towards the waiting cameras after his admission of guilt is tragic and inevitable. Rob Morrow holds his own, but he could have toned down the accent. Turturro is suitably annoying, and Azaria & Paymer knock it out of the park.

The finger wagging at corporate greed is tiresome, but expected. At one point Goodwin advises the deeply guilty Enright to roll over on NBC and Geritol because, “They’re the ones making all the money.” The anti-corporate message mars the final act, as does Goodwin’s melodramatic observation slash warning, “I thought I was going to get television. The truth is, television’s going to get us.” Still, the movie is riveting, beautifully shot by Michael Ballhaus, well acted, unexpectedly funny, and until the end, offers sharp observations about human nature.

“I have always been interested in what I call actor-speak – and when I say “interested”, I mean “intrigued in the way you might be by a man talking to himself, without having any desire to go over and engage him in conversation”. However, while I continue to march past muttering men on park benches, I am, thanks to my job, an unwitting expert on actor-speak, having spent many hours of my life listening to actors bang on about their “love of the craft” and “the thing about [insert name of director] – he takes you on an emotional journey”.

“Some may call this argument prejudicial, but those who do have never spent a morning with Helen Hunt, listening to her expound on her skills. This has nothing to do with lack of respect for actors; just a lack of respect for the language they learn – perhaps at acting school – to describe what they do.

“The New Yorker event sounded promising: its panel of pleasing scene-stealers included John Turturro and Joan Cusack. But when – just 10 minutes in – panel member and actor Richard Kind (you’ll know him, look him up), said actors do theatre “to nourish themselves”, I knew I’d made a grave tactical error. The verb “nourish” should only be used in a culinary context, and even then with restraint.

“And, lo, they kept a-coming: there was “our craft” and “the journey one goes on”. To finish, actor Christine Baranski announced that “acting is like creating life”. Considering this comment came straight after the clip showing her in the sitcom Cybill, that seemed a pretty awesome claim. Shrieking onset at Cybill Shepherd v being God –I guess it’s six of one, half-dozen of the other. …

The day after I learned that being an actor was like being God, the God-like Sienna Miller was interviewed in the New York Times about her forthcoming Broadway role and, bless her, she seemed to have swallowed a dictionary of actor-speak on the flight from London: “I just try to put myself emotionally in a very dark place. After that, I trust a lot in the writing.” In other words, she pretends to be the character and then she recites the script.

Read the full piece here. 

Director Spike Lee’s third film, “Do the Right Thing,” hasn’t aged a day since its 1989 release. The film’s misguided views on violence were wrong-headed the second it hit theaters. And the election of President Barack Obama surely puts some of the film’s victimization subtext in fresh perspective. But as sheer entertainment, “Thing” remains a blistering experience, the culmination of every one of Lee’s unique gifts as a filmmaker.

The film’s re-release on DVD June 30 reminds us Lee hasn’t come anywhere close to matching “Thing’s” raw power in the intervening years.

“Thing” stars Lee as Mookie, a disinterested pizza delivery man working on the hottest day of the summer in the Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn. Pizza shop owner Sal (Danny Aiello) is thoroughly old school, and his bickering sons (John Turturro and Richard Edson) are hardly paragons of virtue. But Sal doesn’t have hate in his heart for his customers, who are almost all black. His food has fed them for years, he says with pride.

But a local radical (Giancarlo Esposito) doesn’t like Sal’s shop because it features a gallery of Italian-Americans on the wall – and no African-Americans. The disgruntled customer isn’t the only one on edge. The sweltering heat has everyone in a foul mood. It’s the perfect catalyst for what follows.

Lee’s films routinely polarize audiences and critics alike, but often at the expense of narrative and character development. Here, every Lee element falls right in place.

Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, a director in his own right (“Bulletproof,” “Surviving the Game”), burnishes the screen with shades of brick orange to evoke a melting pot bubbling over.

Scene after scene crackles with out-sized characters, often anchored by terrific actors (Ossie Davis, Samuel L. Jackson among them). The film helped introduce Rosie Perez, Jackson and Martin Lawrence to the movie going public.

There’s not a wasted frame in the film. Every sequence has a purpose and a pulse, and the debates it inspired 20 years ago are still raging in one form or another today.

“Do the Right Thing” slips in a few telegraphed punches, like a brick wall emblazoned with the message “Tawana told the truth,” a reference to the racially charged Tawana Brawley case of the era.

The DVD features the usual gaggle of extras, from commentary by Lee and a self-congratulatory reunion of the cast.

Lee’s racial politics typically rub conservative audiences the wrong way. But with “Do the Right Thing,” Lee proved he could make a film that rose above ideological battle lines.