Media madness reigns supreme in screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's scathing satire about the uses and abuses of network television. But while Chayefsky's and director Sidney Lumet's take on television may seem quaint in the age of "reality TV" and Jerry Springer's talk-show fisticuffs, it's every bit as potent now as it was when the film was released in 1976. And because Chayefsky was one of the greatest of all dramatists, his Oscar-winning script about the ratings frenzy at the cost of cultural integrity is a showcase for powerhouse acting by Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight (who each won Oscars), and Oscar nominee William Holden in one of his finest roles. Finch plays a veteran network anchorman who's been fired because of low ratings. His character's response is to announce he'll kill himself on live television two weeks hence. What follows, along with skyrocketing ratings, is the anchorman's descent into insanity, during which he fervently rages against the medium that made him a celebrity. Dunaway plays the frigid, ratings-obsessed producer who pursues success with cold-blooded zeal; Holden is the married executive who tries to thaw her out during his own seething midlife crisis. Through it all, Chayefsky (via Finch) urges the viewer to repeat the now-famous mantra "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" to reclaim our humanity from the medium that threatens to steal it away. --Jeff Shannon Amazon.com essential video
Not only is this a great dvd, but the delivery was prompt and the dvd was in new condition. I am very happy with this product. I will surely order from this seller again.
December 1, 2008 |  | A true classic -- must see |  |
For any of you who have never seen this movie, and you want to see a movie with an unusual story, this is a good one. It is timeless in expressing how fed up people can get with things around them, and whether they can make a splash in this world as they travel through...
I saw this movie 30 years ago but never forgot it. It was definitely worth rewatching. It amazes me how movies like this get overlooked in the television channel reruns....
November 15, 2008 The movie is a prophetic masterpiece. Look around you. Here we are at the height of the information age. Innudated with pseudo reality shows. Biased media spin doctors creating political super-stars and even getting a unqualified junior senator elected President of the US. Might as well been written by Chayesky himself.
As mentioned in an earlier review the digital transfer leads much to be desired. But the films message is so important, even now 30 years later, that you should buy it anyway.
November 11, 2008 | | Television should be able to kill without bulletts | |
It could have been a great film. It had all it needed to be a masterpiece. It debunked the old traditional boring television of our great grand parents, that television that was speaking all the time in order to bring us the truth, to teach us the true truth, to make us believe every word they said was absolutely inspiring and we had to be thankful and grateful for this new medium to be so effective in teaching us, in lifting us out of our ignorance. They treated television as a super book, an encyclopedia and they had not understood the slightest smallest element of what this medium was. They had not read Marshall McLuhan and when they had heard of him they thought he was trite, insignificant and purely ranting and raving. And they were going to learn the power of this medium the hard way. One day, by accident, due to the neurotic caprice of one of the team, they discover the tremendous power it has on the imagination and on the behavior of people. People believed the antic as if it were true, absolutely true because it was live and unexpected, hence true since un-programmed. And the newer generation ran into the opening and they invented that television that immerse you into live reality through purely virtual and fake images, even when they are really live, because the camera is a processor, an intermediary eye that gives you what they want you to see and the objective is to make you feel happy, serene, or even angry but with the serenity of the certitude that you are not alone and that everyone is as angry as you are, and that you cannot stand reality any more and that this is absolutely justified since millions of people are feeling the same way as you at the very same moment. Television is not supposed to make you think but only to make you feel part of a vaster reality, of a large vital movement. And that's where the film becomes bad because it seems to follow the idea the older generation is airing at the younger one that this television is shutting everyone onto themselves, separating them from all others, individualizing them into absolute isolation. False, false, false again and again. This new television is soaking you individually into the images of the reality the way this TV wants you to see it, but that is only part of the business. You accept this experience of being dipped and at times thrown or drowned into the boiling maelstrom of violence, war, crime, horror, etc, because you know you are not alone, because it gives you the sense of belonging to a vast mass of people and the possibility to share that common experience with them all tomorrow morning without even having to tell about it. One word will be enough to bring that never directly experienced community back to the subconscious mind of the millions of people who have watched the same show. News is not about truth or about teaching. News is show business, news is emotional and even psycho-dramatic sensations, an experience in surrogate horror, both liberating (cathartic the older ones would have said) and enslaving the proud isolated individual you do feel you are becoming with all that television to the crowd of viewers. And all that is of a commercial nature. The ratings are supposed to bring in advertising and money and when the sensation that started it all does not work anymore because the man, the guru, the anchorman, the preacher does not understand that he cannot start telling people they are living in a dictatorship, even and especially if it is true, you have to get rid of him. The end is quite simple-minded: kill him with guns and bullets. Television can kill someone in so many other ways that are symbolical, mediatic, bloodless but just as effective, efficacious and even cruelly efficient. And the producer of the film knew from scratch all that truth indeed since this producer, Ted Turner, had been refused by the CBS and was in the process of creating the CNN, the acme of reality news and reality television only dealing with the real world and bringing the millions of people of its globalized audience a predigested vision that was only targeting at homogenizing the mediatic mind-formatting experience and consciousness of the world. Virtual reality is the true reality, and that is the very power of this medium that we cannot deny nor reduce to something else, even if teaching real ideas and arguments. Television is an all-sensorial experience building device for individuals who want to belong to a consensual mass.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
November 2, 2008The DVD was perfect, but the space that holds the DVD was broken. It didn't scratch it, but I can't put the disc back in the thing. A +++++ on the amount of time it took to get to me!
October 24, 2008More reviews at Amazon.com ...
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