Network
by Sidney Lumet
List Price:
Our Price: $4.03
You Save: $10.95 (73%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $3.50 (click here)
Category: VHS Video
See more movie releases
Buy this VHS video movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Product details
Actor: Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall, Wesley Addy, William HoldenDirector: Sidney Lumet
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC, Original recording reissued
Running Time: 121 minutes
Release Date: 2000-03-07
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Publisher: Warner Home Video
Studio: Warner Home Video
VHS Movie Reviews of Network
Movie Review: Television should be able to kill without bulletts
Summary: 4 Stars
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
Movie Review: Network DVD
Summary: 4 Stars
The 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!Movie Review: More Relevant Today Than When It Was Released.
Summary: 5 Stars
The movie Zeitgeist showed excerpts from Network - this brought back memories of seeing the movie when my hormones were more important than my Weltanschauung. They will not make mainstream movies like this today as it lifts the lid on the machine. Today all corporations are intertwined if you've noticed how the elite are bailing each other out so they can maintain the 'system' it's also bad for business to show this, hell, someone might notice what's going on.
[...]
Perhaps this movie will be banned once the Nazis are in power which may be sooner than you think. It' something to show your children.
Movie Review: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!
Summary: 5 Stars
Show a remarkable prescience for a 1976 movie, Paddy Chayefsky's brutal satire of the television nation in the not so distant future still stings the eyes. Faye Dunaway's cutthroat executive was talking reality TV almost a quarter century before Survivor's First Season and Peter Finch's satirical Howard Beale was the sociopathic nutjob who would eventually turn up as "journalists" like Michael Savage or Billo The Clown. "Network" was one of the first movies to win multiple Academy Awards for its actors (Finch, Dunaway and Beatrice Straight, supporting actress as William Holden's long suffering wife) plus Chayefsky's screenplay.
Some 30 years later and the points "Network" makes still drill home. The fact that you could still make this movie today and have it be just as ruthlessly efficient speaks of its brilliance. After all, what makes "The Mao-Tse Tung Hour" all that different than a season of Jack Bauer and 24on Fox? (Even more to the point, "Network" was made when the idea of a 4'th Network other than ABC, NBC or CBS was considered ludicrous.) When Dunaway berates a news executive over his "sanctity of the news department," she pile drivers him thusly:
"I watched your 6 o'clock news today; it's straight tabloid. You had a minute and a half of that lady riding a bike naked in Central Park; on the other hand, you had less than a minute of hard national and international news. It was all sex, scandal, brutal crime, sports, children with incurable diseases, and lost puppies. So, I don't think I'll listen to any protestations of high standards of journalism when you're right down on the streets soliciting audiences like the rest of us."
Does her take on the future sound eerily like 2008? The fact is, we have long since moved to the point where the journalist is the story and the certifiable Howard Beale is golden, at least until his instability threatens his advertising stream. While that leads to the no-longer far-fetched conclusion, it also give Ned Beatty a hilariously over the top moment that briefly steals the movie. Beatty's nominated role as Head Honcho Arthur Jensen seems like Ted Turner before he became a broadcast mogul...there are so many predictions in "Network" that it seems like it came backwards in time.
Movies influenced by "Network": Wag the Dog, All the President's Men, The Running Man.
Movie Review: Great movie
Summary: 5 Stars
I got this DVD for my son and he loved it so much that he suggested that I watch it also. I did and it was really good and so true for today's struggling economy and papparazzi even though it was supposed to have taken place in the 70s. I agree with other reviewers and think that it should be re-released at the theaters.
Summary of Network
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 ShannonSatire Video
Video Genres
- Action & Adventure
- African American Cinema
- Animation
- Anime & Manga
- Art House & International
- Classics
- Comedy
- Cult Movies
- Documentary
- Drama
- Educational
- Fitness
- Gay & Lesbian
- Horror
- Kids & Family
- Military & War
- Music Video & Concerts
- Musicals & Performing Arts
- Mystery & Suspense
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Special Interests
- Sports
- Television
- Westerns
Movies most talked about in Satire Video
The Opposite Sex (1956)MGM/UA Home Video; Release date: 1995-02-24; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $159.99
Animal Farm (1999)Hallmark; Release date: 2000-01-18; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $6.99
Price in other shops:
Dr StrangeloveSony Pictures; Release date: 1994-06-22; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $8.98
Price in other shops:
All About EveTwentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation; Release date: 1995-03-01; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $2.85
Price in other shops:
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The MovieUniversal Studios; Release date: 1997-04-08; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $7.99
Price in other shops:
Cold Turkey (1971)MGM (Video & DVD); Release date: 1998-09-01; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $74.95
The Farmer's Daughter (1947)Starz / Anchor Bay; Release date: 1999-03-30; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $62.50
Best Man (1964)MGM/UA Home Video; Release date: 1998-09-01; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Price in other shops:
Duck SoupUniversal Studios; Release date: 1992-03-01; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $15.96
No Time for SergeantsWarner Home Video; Release date: 1994-07-22; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $49.37
Similar Video, DVDs, Audio CDs
The French ConnectionTWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT; Release date: 2005-02-01; DVD
Best price: $7.23
Price in other shops:
A Clockwork OrangeRelease date: 1999-06-29; DVD
Best price: $16.57
Price in other shops:
Bonnie and ClydeWarner Brothers; Release date: 1999-05-18; DVD
Best price: $4.64
Price in other shops:
Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Special Edition)Sony; Release date: 2001-02-27; DVD
Best price: $6.18
Price in other shops:
Midnight CowboyRelease date: 2000-01-01; DVD
Best price: $6.75
Price in other shops:
Citizen Kane (Two-Disc Special Edition)Warner Brothers; Release date: 2001-09-25; DVD
Best price: $9.33
Price in other shops:
Broadcast NewsRelease date: 1999-10-05; DVD
Best price: $4.08
Price in other shops:
Sunset Boulevard (Special Collector's Edition)Paramount; Release date: 2002-11-26; DVD
Best price: $4.60
Price in other shops:
Chinatown (Special Collector's Edition)Paramount; Release date: 2007-11-06; DVD
Best price: $7.85
Price in other shops:
All the President's Men (Two-Disc Special Edition)Warner Brothers; Release date: 2006-02-21; DVD
Best price: $8.74
Price in other shops: