Rating: 
Summary: I'll Be Brief
Review: Incredible film.Lumet and company put on a clinic. If you haven't become a humanoid who refuses to see anything pre-TomCruise then you're missing out on not just one great film, but many. This movie is about finding your own voice, and not simply accepting the truth as given. You've got to seek it out!
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: This is one of my top 5 movies of all time. The dialogue is funny and fantastic and tight tight tight. Peter Finch's performance as the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves Howard Beale is maybe the best movie acting I have ever seen. Paddy Chayefsky presages the growth of reality/trash TV, whiner/hater shows in the media, and TV clowns like O'Reilly. The fictional IBS network in the movie IS the Fox network of today. This is biting social commentary about the vapidness and vacuity of our TV culture - 26 years old but still right on.
Rating:
Summary: NOT MAD AS HELL AND TAKING IT ALL THE TIME
Review: Howard Beale, the enlightened news anchor explains: Network is about the use of TV as the opiate of capitalistic society. As long as the masses are passified by TV they'll only focus on what they're fed. Meanwhile the corporate elite monopolize the markets while the government serves their interests at the expense of the middle class. The lonely society's main social relationship is with their TVs and become interested in TVs feel good sensationalized distractions and their only purpose.. make the rich richer through their labor and purchases.
Network asks the audience, "Can we turn off our TV and stand up for our rights?" "Are we too far gone?" Would a media mogul (like Rupert Murdoch of FOX) permit it? 2002 Network reality emphatically answers - we can not be saved!
Rating:
Summary: As poignant today as it was 25 years ago....
Review: This satire of Network TV seemed a bit far-fetched 25 years ago...but much of what was presented as satire back then has become reality on today's boob tube...One can't help but take a look at how the news was bastardized in this film, and compare it to the real life bastardization of network news into shows such as Jerry Springer, Network Morning news-talk shows and Cable News networks like MSNBC and CNN which present their personal bias as real news...
I can actually imagine someone like Dan Rather contemplating blowing his brains out for ratings ala Howard Beale...
Rating:
Summary: I'm as MAD AS HELL....
Review: That it took so long to release this movie on DVD. I have a Beta, a VHS, and recently purchased a Laserdisc before I noticed it was available on DVD. Super DVD folks, good transfer, it's hard to beleive Dunnaway or Duval were ever that young.. ha ha.
Rating:
Summary: All I know is You've Got to Get MAD!
Review: UBS is a struggling network, it's news division filled with more than competent veterans of old school journalism no longer able to keep up in the pace of modern television and essentially put out to pasture. Then one night their Network News Anchor goes on the air and says that his life and the whole world is nothing more than a load of BS and his marriage a "Shrill shrieking fraud." Guess what? The ratings go up, so Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall, two eager Network tigers who view the whole universe through the formula of ratings and shares keep him on and encourage him despite his nervous breakdown which leads to the now famous, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" monologue. William Holden is the ethical best friend of the unfortunate newscaster and wants no part of the freakshow but has a wandering eye for Dunaway. This 1970's time capsul will bring any Gen X'er up to date on what the hot shows were during the Bicentennial days, but despite the references the content still seems way ahead of its time, which makes, "A Face in the Crowd" of which it is somwhat of a ripoff, seem even more prophetic.
Rating:
Summary: not mad enough
Review: Recently purchased by a large conglomerate, mired in fourth place in the ratings, the UBS network is increasingly under the effective control of
corporate hatchet man Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) who has brought in Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) to pump up its ratings. As one of the
new team's first steps, they've decided to get rid of the long time anchorman of their evening newscast, Howard Beale (Peter Finch), this despite the
objections of his friend Max Schumacher (William Holden). Max is head of the news division, though his power appears to be slipping away. But
then Howard goes on the air and announces that he plans on killing himself on air in one week's time and suddenly he's got a top-rated show. Diana
who cares about nothing (and no one) other than ratings, jumps all over the situation, recognizing that they can exploit Beale's apparent mental
breakdown to lure in viewers. This works briefly, but when the curiosity factor dies out the show begins to slide. Then, after a meeting at which Max is humiliated to find out he no
longer has any real control over the news, he lets Howard go on the air in an obvious state of disarray. Howard launches into the impassioned speech
for which the film is most famous (see above), about how the country is going to the dogs and it's time for everyone to stand up and say : "I'm as mad
as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore". Now, instead of just being a novelty act, Howard seems to be speaking for the legions of disaffected
and frustrated Americans. He's become the prophet of doom--he even experiences visitations--who Diana has been looking for and she's ready to get
the most out of him. Once the chase for ratings gold begins it quickly spirals out of control. Howard is soon joined on his show by a soothsayer and a studio audience.
Rather than do the news, he now comes out on stage and rants for several minutes before collapsing to the stage floor. Diana hires an Angela
Davis-style Marxist revolutionary to help develop a show that opens each week with self-shot footage of a terrorist act carried out by the Symbionese
Liberation Army-like "stars"; it's the advent of terrorist reality tv. When Max loses the power struggle with Hackett, he's forced out of the network
entirely, though he continues an affair with Diana. In one of the very best scenes ever in the movies, Mrs. Schumacher (Beatrice Straight in an Academy Award winning role), refuses to accept his
decision to leave her. She lays out in the starkest terms possible the quality of his betrayal of her and of their marriage : Get out, go anywhere you want, go to a hotel, go live with her, but don't come back! Because, after 25 years of building a home and raising
a family and all the senseless pain that we have inflicted on each other, I'm damned if I'm gonna stand here and have you tell me you're
in love with somebody else! Because this isn't a convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or - or some broad that you picked up
after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn't it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years.
Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion, and I get the dotage? What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed
to sit home knitting and purling while you slink back like some penitent drunk? I'm your wife, damn it! And, if you can't work up a
winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance! (She sobs) I'm hurt! Don't you understand that? I'm hurt badly! Just as the Network is sacrificing integrity and quality in favor of sensationalism and profits, so too is Max shown to be sacrificing personal integrity,
his own dignity, and his obligations to his wife in the pursuit of mere sensation. By the time that even the Marxist guerillas are arguing over who
owns syndication rights for their series, it becomes plain that everyone's values are for sale as television consumes and cheapens all human emotions
and ideas and then regurgitates a debased pabulum that entertains without making any demand upon the viewer. When Howard Beale begins to
reveal this truth to his viewers, exposing the shallowness and tawdriness of their lives, and the exploitative nature of the medium, panic sets in at the network. They determine that
Howard must be gotten rid of at any cost. And when Max finally realizes that Diana is the very personification of television--empty; emotionless;
profit driven; an observer of, rather than a participant in, reality--their relationship too falls apart. Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the screenplay, had worked in television in its early days (most famously, writing Marty [1953]), when there was a
genuine commitment on the part of networks to balance out the prevalent dreck with some quality programming and with a commitment to news as a
public service. The future he imagined for television may have seemed pessimistic at the time but has more than come to fruition. We live in an age
when the networks show suicides, car chases, workplace and high school shootings live; put people on desert islands and pit them against each other;
sell time to psychics; compete against one another to show ever more explicit sex, violence, and profanity; don't cover political conventions and
presidential speeches, but provide blanket coverage of celebrity deaths and arrests; and so on, ad nauseum. In retrospect Chayefsky's vision was
nowhere near dark enough, nor Howard Beale mad enough. GRADE : A+
Rating:
Summary: The champagne of movie writing.
Review: April 16, 2002 "A very famous quotation from this movie is being used in a lot
of reviews, and I'm not going to perpetuate it anymore!" If I had to pick one scriptwriter to talk to about one script,
I'd pick Paddy Chayefsky and 'Network.' How long did it take to write? How many drafts? How concrete
were your concepts when you wrote it? Is there any excised material
I can look at?
I can think of no other movie that has as many great speeches
as this one. You rarely ever get more than one a film (there's some
kind of unwritten rule about that, I think): Brando's "I Coulda Been
A Contender" speech from 'On The Waterfront'; Duke Wayne's trail drive
speech from 'Red River'; any Bogart film.
Here I count no less than four. Two are made by the character of Harold Beale on the air,
summarizing for anyone who can stomach to listen the precise cost of
television in our lives and upon our souls. Another is by Max Shumacher
to his cynical, destructive TV producer lady love. It's the sort of
long personal tirade that's impossible to pull off in real life, but
that doesn't stop us from trying). The fourth speech is the most
devastating of the lot. It's the "personal cosmology of David Jensen"
as recited by Ned Beatty. Consider it a primer of sorts for becoming
seriously interested in giving up all hope about humanity's ability to
advance itself fundamentally. You think it's easy to write this kind of movie? Ask David Mamet,
Warren Beatty, Spike Lee, and countless other filmmakers, many of whom
have tried their hands at this sort of material with varying degrees
of success. Mamet came off best, I think, with the passable 'Wag The
Dog,' but even that film was curiously lifeless and very broad.
Beatty's 'Bullworth' and Lee's 'Bamboozled' missed more widely. In
fact, the only other contemporary work that equals 'Network' for its
satirical power is Tom Wolfe's 'Bonfire Of The Vanities.' And even then there was not this level of prognostication
involved. And it's got William Holden in it, too. PEOPLE WHO'LL LIKE THIS MOVIE: everyone should. PEOPLE WHO WONT LIKE THIS MOVIE: Jerry Springer fans, watchers
of Entertainment Tonight, followers of current fashion and music trends,
wrestling lovers, purchasers of mass appeal magazines, and everybody
else who "thinks like the tube, dresses like the tube, and acts like the
tube", most of whom might become severely confused about point the movie
is trying to make; also, Sidney Lumet's function as a director has always
been to simply get his actors and script on screen as economically and
undiluted as possible, so he's far from the most visually arresting
filmmaker.
Rating:
Summary: More poignant than ever
Review: --when this film came out, people probably thought it was extreme. Now? It resembles the TV industry more than anything else before or since. A scary backwords look at today that, unfortunately, came true.
Rating:
Summary: A classic film. Clearly holds up even today!
Review: The film itself illustrates how the pursuit of ratings (intern ad revenue) greatly influences how far a company can go. The acting in the film is outright superb. You don't find films made like this anymore. What I would like to see would be and updated version of it with Matt Drudge (if you're reading) to play Peter Finch! This one is one of the few films I'll buy instead of just renting
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