The Tube

After French journalist Luc Mariot's four-year-old daughter threw a hissy fit when the TV was--in her considered opinion--turned off prematurely, he did what any sensible parent would do: marched her fanny into her room for a well-deserved time out, right? Ha, ha. No, what Mr. Mariot did was launch into a half-assed investigation into the addictive/harmful properties of television viewing, chronicled here with almost farcical attention to utterly superfluous detail (when Mariot enters, say, a weather station, a graphic in the lower screen informs us that the time is 1:02 p.m.--as if we are in the middle of a Tom Clancy thriller) and almost no solid data about anything whatsoever. Far more mindless than its subject, Peter Entell's The Tube follows our modern Don Quixote through France, Japan and America as he interviews Japanese television producers (who revisit the infamous flickering Pokemon episode broadcast in 1997 that induced seizures in hundreds of children), General Electric scientists, and researchers who studied alpha brainwave patterns in TV viewers. While some of these folks offer interesting (if often unsubstantiated) commentary, far too much of the screen time in this bloated 82-minute non-epic is devoted to bland cinema vérité footage of Mariot walking purposefully in the airport terminal, doing Internet research in real time, phoning home to check in with the family, and trying to locate interviewees--intercut with clips of people filming themselves watching television (a kind of b-roll silent chorus cooked up by the filmmakers that literally and figuratively says absolutely nothing). While a serious documentary about the possible physiological effects of watching television would be a welcome addition, this is little more than a filmed press junket, albeit an odd one in which the reporter receives more coverage than the ostensible subject. Not recommended. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)