 |  | Tongue-In-Cheek, Excellent Satire! Too Bad About the DVD! |  |
This movie is an all-time classic because it retains its ability to entertain and to move its audience over the years. It's been 30 years but this film ages very well as its theme of amorality, exploitation and dehumanising of people for the sake of selfish motives and the almighty dollar is still relevant today e.g. subprime, credit crisis etc. Add that to brilliant acting by Finch in his best ever performance in a role that seems to have been written just for him as well as by Dunaway who is excellent in her role. This powerful movie is one of my all-time favourites.
Unfortunately, this dvd version is very poor as the picture quality has many imperfections such as white spots having not been restored and barely rises above VHS quality. The sound quality is also poor having not been remastered. My advice is to give this version a miss and to wait for a well restored and remastered version with at least Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound options as well as good Special Features to surface either in the standard or in the new Blu-ray formats. Surely a classic like this deserves a lot better than this poor quality dvd version.
December 15, 2008Not only is this a great dvd, but the delivery was prompt and the dvd was in new condition. I am very happy with this product. I will surely order from this seller again.
December 1, 2008 | | A true classic -- must see | |
For any of you who have never seen this movie, and you want to see a movie with an unusual story, this is a good one. It is timeless in expressing how fed up people can get with things around them, and whether they can make a splash in this world as they travel through...
I saw this movie 30 years ago but never forgot it. It was definitely worth rewatching. It amazes me how movies like this get overlooked in the television channel reruns....
November 15, 2008 The movie is a prophetic masterpiece. Look around you. Here we are at the height of the information age. Innudated with pseudo reality shows. Biased media spin doctors creating political super-stars and even getting a unqualified junior senator elected President of the US. Might as well been written by Chayesky himself.
As mentioned in an earlier review the digital transfer leads much to be desired. But the films message is so important, even now 30 years later, that you should buy it anyway.
November 11, 2008 | | Television should be able to kill without bulletts | |
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
November 2, 2008More reviews at Amazon.com ...
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