8.4 | / 10 |
Users | 3.9 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 3.9 |
Newscaster Howard Beale has a message for those who package reports of cute puppies, movie premieres and fender benders as hard news: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” A satire (an Academy Award-winning screenplay) about the things people do for love…and ratings.
Starring: Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall, Wesley AddyDrama | 100% |
Dark humor | 14% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital Mono
Spanish: Dolby Digital Mono
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 3.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
My wife was a news anchor in several major markets nationwide until she had the good sense to get out of broadcasting and find some honest work. Yes, that’s a joke, but just barely. Having visited a working newsroom on several occasions, I can say without much fear of being contradicted that news people are hard working (sometimes hard drinking), often fearless, folk, and they also do not suffer fools gladly. They also have about the blackest senses of humor imaginable, perhaps a defense mechanism built up to help them cope with the many tragedies their careers force them to cover. But even the best sense of humor can’t protect longtime news reporters and anchors from one stark reality: they have seen their workplaces change, in sometimes epochal ways, over the past quarter of a century or so, as duopoly rules meant fewer employees working for more stations (simultaneously in many instances), and perhaps even more importantly, with the slow but steady accretion of that new genre, infotainment, where news and entertainment content became miraculously merged into one amorphous, slightly slimy, gel.
It’s all the more remarkable, then, that Paddy Chayefsky’s marvelous script for Network is so frighteningly prescient. After all, in 1976, when the film was released, the evening news was still a nightly tradition for most adult Americans, and the three broadcast networks ruled the airwaves with iconic anchors like Cronkite, Smith, Chancellor and Brinkley. It would be four to five more years until shows like Entertainment Tonight started cropping up in syndication, slowly blurring the line between news and entertainment, and 24 hour news networks like CNN appeared on the horizon, needing, well, 24 hours of content to fill their broadcasting day, thereby creating a whole new market for shows which blended elements of news and entertainment. It seemed to happen almost overnight, seen now from the distance of that quarter century, but Chayefsky obviously saw it coming well before it dawned on the rest of us, and Network was his brilliantly acerbic warning shot across the bow. Unfortunately, too few of us heard, refusing to believe that things could get as bad as Network portrayed them, however satirically. How terribly, terribly wrong we were.
He's mad as hell, if by "mad" you mean "crazy."
Network beams onto Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p image in 1.78:1. I saw this film several times theatrically and can attest to the fact it never featured the sharpest looking image, something that director Lumet actually seems to favor, at least in his "big city" urban mode. The overall image here is therefore slightly on the soft side, though that is representative of what the film originally looked like. Too many younger viewers come to these mid-1970's films without appreciating them within the context of their times; from the early 1970's to around a decade later, films by and large were much, much softer looking than they are today, and Network fits that pattern to a tee. There's a noticeable uptick in color and saturation here, with good to very good fine detail. Note for example the funny-crazy patterned news set for Beale, which in previous home video releases never popped the way it does on BD. In the most brightly and naturally lit scenes, fine detail is quite good; in the main scene with Holden and Straight, with some lingering close-ups, it's exceptional. Black levels are really good, especially in the many dark control booth sequences, where the mixers' dark hair never crushes into the background shadows. Grain is intact and gives the film a suitably natural look.
Network debuts on Blu-ray with a generally fine, if obviously very narrow, DTS-HD Master Audio mono mix. Some of the film suffers from a bit of boxiness, but generally dialogue and effects are delivered with robust fidelity. This is actually a film which could have benefited quite well from a repurposed 5.1 track, especially in some of the multi-network simultaneous feed sequences, where everything pumping out of one channel can make the track sound muddled and too busy. Generally, though, this is a clean and damage free track. It may not be very exciting or modern day cinema-like, but it gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and bother.
Network offers a nice slate of supplements:
Network gave the world the inimitable catchphrase "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take this anymore!" Very few times in film history has a film delivered such a blistering critique of modern culture while at the same time being so frighteningly prophetic. What's most amazing about Network, however, is how deeply, darkly funny it is. Highly recommended.
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