comments:
I think you made a great blind buy. Network is one of those 1970s movies that somehow feels more relevant now than when it was released. It’s a very dark satire about television news becoming entertainment, corporate owners chasing ratings, and anger itself being packaged and sold to an audience. Much of what seemed deliberately outrageous in 1976 now looks uncomfortably familiar. It also has an absurdly strong cast: Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, Beatrice Straight, and Ned Beatty. Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay is full of huge, fiercely written speeches, but Sidney Lumet keeps it grounded enough that it never feels like people merely reciting clever dialogue. It won four Oscars, including three for acting and one for Chayefsky’s screenplay. Highly recommend Dave Itzkoff’s book Mad as Hell. He explains that prominent television executives and journalists originally dismissed the movie as an unrealistic caricature. In hindsight, its transformation of news into a corporate profit center, its theatrical outrage merchants, and its increasingly fragmented media audience look less like satire and more like a road map. That’s really the source of the lasting “hype.” It’s brilliantly written and acted, endlessly quotable, and more disturbing with every passing decade. Go into it without reading much more. You’ll understand very quickly why Criterion gave it this treatment.