Network is the tale of the fictional newscaster, "Howard Beale", and the fictional station "UBS". Howard Beal embraces a new type of newsreporting of self destruction and anger when he realizes that he will soon be fired. At first everybody at the news place is completely mad at what Howard has said on the air, but then they notice that the ratings have gone up because nobody before him has talked complete honesty on the news before. This is pretty much the exact same plot layout as Bullworth, which came much later than Network. Bullworth is the tale of a US president who gets depressed and gives up the lies and political trickery and such and just goes on a path of self destruction and honesty, his handlers dispise it at first, but then they realize that the people like this type of honesty. Personally, I like Bullworth more because there is more truth to it. When you watch Bullworth, you can tell that they aren't editing themselves. With Network, you can tell that they are either editing their plot to make it more capitalist friendly, or the writers are just stupid. There are many examples of this in Network and I don't have time to list them. Another thing that anoyed me about Network was this neo-phyte 'radical' staff member at the network, Diana (I think), who embraced the chaotic stance and wanted to give the viewers the "real truth". This normally wouldn't bother me, except she didn't know what the fuck she was talking about and that that progressivism and radicalism was all about robbing banks and killing people. That's one example of a form of editing in the movie. Yes, that main character promotes radicalism, BUT it's not real radicalism, it's a corporate media spin-off of what it's really about and she's givin into it... when you watch this movie, however, you are supposed to think that she really is some sort of radical and she knows what she is talking about. Some examples of how she didn't know what was up was when she said people needed 'different views' like of "Stalin and his dandy bunch of Bolshevick". This was perticulary annoying because they weren't "stalin's bolsheviks". Lenin created the Bolsheviks and Stalin later became one himself, then came to power after that. So saying that they were Stalin's Bolsheviks is kind of a spin-off of the truth and degrades the original Bolsheviks. Also she made some weird comment about how Che Guavara was all about robbing banks or something. Later in the movie, there is a good quote about how Howard Beal is getting in the way of the natural order of things, capitalism, and how there is no democracy any more, there is only ATT, IBM, ABC and so on. It's a really good speech, but it misses some important things: It fails to mention that this is caused by CAPITALISM. Yes, in the whole speech about how capitalism is taking over, he failed to mention the word "CAPITALISM"! He said that it was the "natural order of things". I believe this is true, that greed is natural when people are high in power, but the movie failed to mention that there are alternatives and the movie also failed to mention that the REST of the world is not getting into this "natural order of things". It lets us, the viewers, know that something is kind of wrong with this picture, but it's natural and there is no alternative; which is hardly a revolutionary or radical viewpoint that the movie seems to think it conveys. Yet another thing that pissed me off was when Howard Beal was talking about how the network was being bought by another network which was controlled by this Saudi Arabian interest group. I agree that things like this happen every day, but NEVER would the network ALLOW somebody on primetime television to just say things like that! The movie gives the impression that it's actually possible for us to hear corporate truth like that. Also, Howard spun this off as that the "arabs are getting more american money again!". Which was very very ignorant, when you see how the Saudi's live compared to Americans. Obviously Arabs have been screwed out of their money countless times by America, yet Howard says that "the arabs are taking OUR money!". He, of course is REFERRING to a few Saudi Arabs at the top which are making money (like now days still), but makes it sound as if every Arab is personally stealing our money. Anyways, this movie really annoyed me. It could have been a really good movie if it actually pushed some buttons of corporate interests, instead of just pretending to do that and really just made people who watched it even more ignorant to the situation than they already were.
Remember, that a lot of the stuff I'm talking about is subcoincious stuff and small stuff, but that's what really matters in the big picture. If you pay attention when you watch the movie, you'll notice these things that I'm talking about. Lately, I've been reading about media politics and how they spin things even when they are trying to be "liberal" and things of that issue, so that might be one reason I felt like this movie had so many mis-truths in it.
3 1/2 stars
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