Gotcha. I didn’t think Carlin’s routine would be covered in such a book, but I was apparently wrong.
Born 1948. Am not American, and this is not my preferred sort of thing to watch: feel that I could be excused for being oblivious to it. As it happened, I was vaguely aware of the film around the time that it came out – IIRC highly praised by someone I then knew, and mentioned in the British press. All I recalled until reading this thread, was that it was allegedly a hard-hitting piece about the broadcasting media and its potential for abuse and tragedy; and that it involved a character called Diana – the Faye Dunaway role, as I learn.
I was born in 1977 and have seen Network. I think I saw it five years or so ago.
I was familiar with the phrase before I saw the movie.
I was in college and saw it when it first hit the theaters. Loved it a lot but it quickly became one of those over-quoted films that just faded out of my life. I don’t think I’ve watched it in the last 10 years or so.
Disagree I guess. **Network *to me is not a great movie, just good and Bound for Glory was only a glorified B movie. Taxi Driver (oddly on last night) is a timeless classic and the best contender to beat out Rocky and All the President’s Men was just a notch below those 2.
** That is from someone that is a pretty big fan of Woodie Guthrie. But the writing and acting was not great. *
That’s a great movie; though the plot is not unfamiliar, the filming of it was expert, and the result is a tense, atmospheric suspense classic.
I agree: Rocky is well-made, but it’s basically a feel-good formula movie.
The others are far more challenging. (The only one I haven’t seen is the Guthrie biopic, and as a topic, Guthrie fits the ‘challenging’ label beautifully–he was a major anti-establishment iconoclast.)
This is off-topic, but: can anyone even begin to imagine a slate of comparable films being the Oscar nominees in 2016?
Both Network and The Hospital are compromised by Chayefsky’s writing pronouncements rather than lines for his actors, his hamfisted telegraphing the jokes, and his women who mainly exist to either adore or confound the men.
If Rocky was a formula movie, he’d have won the fight at the end.
That’s actually an example of Robot Arm’s First Law of Sports Movies; in the best ones, the result of the big game goes against the tone of the film. Rocky loses the big fight, the Bad News Bears lose their final game, Fast Eddie beats Fats at the end of The Hustler. There are a few exceptions.
No Rocky, did win in the end.
The film is NEVER about boxing or beating the champ, it’s about a lonely man without much of a future or any direction, achieving and finding love at long last. The boxing formula is just something for the character to do. It could have been about any sport or career choice.
I have never seen it but it was on cable here last week and it is waiting on my PVR for me.
Yes, that’s sort of the point of my first law; in great sports movies the hero transcends the game and the final score doesn’t matter. But Sherrerd said Rocky was a formula movie; in a formula movie he would have won the fight and the girl.
If you like it, check out a little remembered 1981 film SOB
It’s almost like a strange kind of sequel - and be sure to get the theater release and not the “TV” version.
No, as Richard John Marcej said (and very well, I might add), the formula has the hero winning in the end, and Rocky did win in the end–he got over his feeling of being one of life’s losers; he found love; and he found a direction for his life and a belief in his own resources.
So, yes: a formula movie.
So same with Bad News Bears (original) then? The writing in Rocky and characters were pretty exceptional. I think it stands the test of time.
I was already over 30 when the movie came out, but didn’t see it until a few years ago (I had known about it, just hadn’t seen it). Great movie.
Haven’t yet seen The Hospital, but Diana Christensen, the female lead in Network, doesn’t at all match your description. Yes, she does confound William Holden’s character, but that’s not her primary purpose. She’s the programming director who almost single-handedly engineers the network’s transformation into an over-the-top tabloid. Without her, Beale’s on-air break-down would have been a passing anomaly; he would have been taken off the air (as the network had planned all along) and there would have been no further plot development to speak of. She’s one of the strongest and least dispensible female characters I’ve ever seen in a film from that era.
So yeah, she’s a plot device. And the whole point of her character is that she has no soul, just marketing instinct. (inner issues and reflections, character development, all that stuff that William Holden gets to do).
It’s the writing that to blame. Faye Dunaway had the chops to do more, as she did in Oklahoma Crude.
Ditto on all counts.
Your description is just as applicable to many of the film’s male characters, including those played by Robert Duvall and Ned Beatty. Dunaway’s character may not change much over the course of the film, but that doesn’t mean she lacks complexity and depth. There’s a reason why she is so soulless and driven, and even if the viewer figures it out on their own, it’s still a joy to watch Holden’s Schumacher articulate it so eloquently, first to his wife and then later in their final scene together.
I imagine the book mentions that this was just in the wake of the debacle of George C. Scott refusing his lead Actor Oscar 6 years earlier and Marlon Brando sending the disastrous proxy Sacheen Littlefeather to receive his Best Actor Oscar 4 years earlier. Those were wounds that were still pretty fresh with the Academy and they wanted to keep as tight a grip on non-scripted elements as possible.