It’s incredibly sad, but this movie means even more today than it ever did in 1976 when it was showered with awards. Back then the movie was advertised as an outrageous satire and according to the IMDb, the writer and director made a statement saying, uh, no, this is what’s really happening. And now, it really is happening. It’s kinda scary to watch.

This has always been one of my favourite movies. I love how rapidly the situation develops, from Howard’s initial declaration of his intent to commit suicide live on air which falls past the disinterested ears of the guys in the control room (“What the f*ck just happened?”) to the network’s seizing this as an opportunity to up the ratings, his fantastic monologue that ends with the immortal line, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”, the transformation of Howard’s show into some kind of freak show, the inevitable wane in interest of the audience and those final shocking scenes of the ‘men in suits’ talking so plainly about their ‘only option’ to solve the drop in ratings. It’s sweeping, hilarious, uplifting, shocking, a wake-up call. The performances are uniformly flawless, this is seriously a movie with its head firmly attached to its shoulders. This is the kind of movie I wake up everyday and wish to God someone would make today.

Oh yeh, two random, disconnected things I noticed on this viewing (okay, one I’ve noticed before but I never reviewed this movie before for some reason): I was browsing the IMDb while watching and I never realised this movie was based on an old Frank Capra movie called Meet John doe. There’s no mention of this in the official movie credits but the stories do sound pretty similar, I’ll have to check that movie out some time. I don’t quite think Capra could have been so in-yer-face as Lumet was somehow, though, lol. The other thing was, there’s a scene featuring an actress called Conchata Ferrell emotionlessly reading pitches to Faye Dunaway. I swear to god she reprised this entire character in Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance, where she played a casting director reading (again, hilariously devoid of emotion) “the other character” to auditioning actor Dick Ritchie. I just find this kinda cool, they really are like exactly the same character and it’s such a Tarantino thing to do I guess, I don’t know if it was intentional. I just felt like adding that.

Tags: media, satire, suicide, television

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 2:29 am and is filed under 5 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.