Una cadena de televisión explota cínicamente los desvaríos y las revelaciones de un antiguo ¿miembro? sobre los medios de comunicación para su propio beneficio.Una cadena de televisión explota cínicamente los desvaríos y las revelaciones de un antiguo ¿miembro? sobre los medios de comunicación para su propio beneficio.Una cadena de televisión explota cínicamente los desvaríos y las revelaciones de un antiguo ¿miembro? sobre los medios de comunicación para su propio beneficio.
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- Ganó 4 premios Óscar
- 20 premios y 27 nominaciones en total
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- Producción, taquilla y más en IMDbPro
Resumen
Reseñas destacadas
perhaps the blackest black comedy ever
Would that it were so.
Today we have Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, Howard Stern, etc. Etc. Etc. At the beginning of the movie a drunken Max Schumacher (William Holden) fantasizes about a show called "the Death Hour" comprised of films of car crashes, suicides, train wrecks, and so forth, to be put on Sunday night in prime time. "It'll blow Disney outta the f------g water!" he laughs. A few years back some network put exactly such a show - "Eye Witness Videos" - on the air. On Sunday night. In prime time. In short, as most everyone here has commented, "Network"'s horrifying vision - brilliantly written by the incredibly prescient Paddy Chayevsky - has been truly and frighteningly prophetic, and rings absolutely true today. The movie is totally over the top yet penetratingly incisive.
The movie is a veritable feast of tour-de-force acting from all involved. In particular William Holden's wrenching performance as the burned-out but still sensitive Max is drop-jaw stunning. I feel he, not Finch, should have gotten the Oscar, though Finch's work is not exactly chopped liver either. And what a brilliant device on Chayevsky's part to make the lunatic Howard Beale the only one of the bunch with clarity of vision.
That the film is intended to be a satire and a comedy is clear from the narration, especially the final comment about Beale becoming the first man to be killed because of lousy ratings. But it is without doubt the blackest black comedy ever filmed.
A lasting legend of the filmmaking art.
A Cynic's Dream
The true brilliance of this film is that all elements of it fade appropriately behind the actors and their messages. The film is completely a work of storytelling and, at least for the writer, stunning clarity of message and purpose. Political films come and go but few remain in the annals of film because of their effectiveness at their own message.
The cinematography, editing, sound, costume design, art direction and production design are all quite simplistic. In some scenes the film can be accused of being almost ugly. However this all lends to the back-washing of the film so as to allow the message to ring loudest. In my opinion, Sidney Lumet took this just a little too far and thus I give it a 9 instead of a 10.
This is certainly a film for the history books. Every connoisseur of film should be exposed to this movie at some point in their life. If you happen to be cynical, then you will love every minute of this movie as its stark view of life in the 1970's (and onward) touches the hard of even the hardest of cynics. For those educators out there, GREAT film for classes on Media and Politics.
Prescient...
Once I had seen ALTERED STATES and read the novel, I was hungry to find out more about the late novelist/playwright/screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, and sought out this movie. It blew me away years ago, but I find it even more stunning now. Not just because of the writing, Sidney Lumet's taut direction or the Oscar-caliber performances by everyone involved, all of which are almost beyond being lauded with superlatives.
But what knocks me out is how Chayefsky seemed less to be writing from the power of his imagination, than channeling Our Times Now. As if he was capable of some form of mental time travel; able to look into the Nineties and beyond to see the coming of SURVIVOR, or Maury Povich, Jerry Springer, Bill O'Reilly and Paris Hilton. Even HE probably didn't know how he knew, but he sure as hell felt it and wrote it down for us to marvel over today.
Sure, there are political and cultural analogies throughout the picture that are dated. But the core of his vision remains startlingly clear and eerily prophetic. As for Howard Beale, there is not one single "celebrity" who mirrors that character today, but maybe he is a composite of several different personalities with whom we have become all too familiar in the world of "news-fo-tainment." Or maybe he simply hasn't materialized yet. Maybe that is just how far ahead of its time NETWORK really was.
After all, being "mad as hell" nowadays has so many more layers of meaning than it did nearly thirty years ago...
We Have Seen the Future, And It Sucks
Now, it's ridiculously overwritten -- NO ONE is as articulate as the characters in this film, and most certainly, no one who works in television is as literate as Diana Christensen (the Faye Dunaway character). I doubt that poet laureates or even Eminem could spew as witty an aside as "muttering mutilated Marxism." But damn if that isn't part of its charm. Plus, outside of Max Schumacher (William Holden), the characters are pretty much archetypes instead of real people (the Robert Duvall character might as well wear a black cape and top hat), but their two-dimensionality works as a good metaphor for Max's seduction into the "shrieking nothingness" or television. Plus the actors are so superb they make screeching caricatures into almost-sympathetic characters: Duvall is a credible and charismatic villain, Finch is a fine mad prophet and Faye Dunaway manages to make a shrill, manipulative, soulless neurotic so damn cute and sexy you'll want to leave your wife for her, too, just as long as she promises to keep sitting cross-legged on your desk and hitching up her skirt. (Therein lies the real eroticism, forget the intentionally mechanical, unerotic coupling later in the flick). Anyway, this is complex, high art masquerading as popular entertainment, go rent it now.
It's so prophetic it's scary
Children should be raised on the truth instead of fiction.
Television seduces, entertains, divides, desensitizes, and corrupts not just kids but adults as well. It's gotten so bad over the years it's like some kind of a disease now. Most people believe everything they see, read, and hear. Fortunately for me, I'm not most people. There are things that I question and there are things that I know are very wrong. Lying to the American people in every possible way is very, very wrong.
I've never seen anyone open up their window and stick out their head and yell that they're as mad as hell and they're not gonna take this anymore. I've never seen anyone say that they were a human being and that their life had value. We're so screwed up in the head we don't even deserve to be called human beings. We're like pre-programmed, numbered, clones enslaved from the cradle to the grave; clones that are programmed and structured to obey authority of all kinds.
"Network" deserved the Best Picture Oscar for '76, but it lost to "Rocky". How the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences allowed that to happen is beyond me.
That's all I have to say about that.
¿Sabías que...?
- CuriosidadesPeter Finch was desperate to win the role of Howard Beale once he had read the script. He even offered to pay his own airfare to New York City for the screentest. But Sidney Lumet was concerned about Finch's Australian accent. Finch won the part after sending Lumet a recording of himself reading the New York Times with a perfect American accent.
- PifiasEvery one of Howard Beale's shows has the same studio audience (note the man in the black vest, with long hair and a beard).
- Citas
Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
- Créditos adicionalesPaddy Chayefsky's credit in the opening credits says "by Paddy Chayefsky" (rather than "written by Paddy Chayefsky" or a variant thereof).
- ConexionesEdited into Grand format: Amérique, notre histoire (2006)
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Detalles
- Fecha de lanzamiento
- País de origen
- Idioma
- Títulos en diferentes países
- Poder que mata
- Localizaciones del rodaje
- CTV Toronto Studios - 9 Channel Nine Court, Scarborough, Ontario, Canadá(as CFTO-TV Studios, Control room and news studio scenes)
- Empresa productora
- Ver más compañías en los créditos en IMDbPro
Taquilla
- Presupuesto
- 3.800.000 US$ (estimación)
- Recaudación en Estados Unidos y Canadá
- 23.689.877 US$
- Recaudación en todo el mundo
- 23.702.220 US$