Recent viewings

Network (1976). This movie is perhaps best known in pop culture as the source of the catchphrase "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!". But it's much more than that. It's a believable but brutal satire of the business of television broadcasting, which is capable of reducing anything and everything -- even the agonized trauma of a suicidal man or the impassioned rantings of a mad prophet -- into just another gutter-wallowing bid for lowest-common-denominator viewer ratings and advertising dollars.

Faye Dunaway is in classic neurotic-steel-butterfly mode as a bright but shallow upwardly mobile careerwoman. Robert Duvall is believably coarse as a philistine corporate hatchetman, and William Holden is sympathetic as an aging holdover from an earlier and more idealistic era. But Peter Finch steals the show as fading news anchorman Howard Beale, who, in despair, announces one night that he will "blow his brains out" on live TV.

The ratings soar. And the executives take notice.

What follows is both hilarious and pathetic, as clueless executives frantically try to control and replicate the kind of passion that the increasingly demented Beale inspires in his audience. One, presciently, proposes a kind of reality series in which the network will support a gang of criminals and film their crimes.

But the most harrowing moment in the movie, hands down, is the moment in which the prophetically-raving Beale is brought into the Holy of Holies, the corporate boardroom, and subjected to the brutally frank Revelation of the Gospel of International Business. The subsequent denouement of the film is almost anticlimactic.