Network

One of the greatest movies of all time and arguably the most prophetic.  For those who have seen it, Network isn't underrated at all.  It has one of the most memorable scenes in movie history and it won four major Academy Awards.  

Yet it is almost never on television and rarely talked about.  Which is pretty amazing considering it could practically be a documentary of how news networks operate today.

Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay looks back at that moment of time when reporting news stopped being about information and started being about the bottom line.  After a recent buyout, a major network manipulates the mad rants of their floundering news division's anchor into ratings gold.  Bringing the world forth into the age of corporate news.

Network was released in 1976.  With every major "free" news outlet in the western world owned by some major corporation this film should be required viewing (Time Warner owns CNN, News Corp. owns Fox, GE owns NBC, Disney owns ABC, Viacom owns CBS).

Network is one underrated flick.

Rant of the Week: Empire Magazine is just a bunch of Monkeys with Typewriters

So it looks like Briton based film mag Empire is making a run at dethroning ESPN for the title of Most Retarded List of Excellence Ever Accumulated.

We're Retarded

A year and 1/2 ago Empire came out with a list of the Greatest Movie Characters of ALL TIME.  And wow, to put it like our friends across the pond might, it was one piece of rubbish alright.

Sure it was almost two years ago now but I just saw it yesterday so it is new to me.

Now, the whole list was an atrocity but lets take a look at some of the highlights.

#1 Tyler Durden.

The guy from Fight Club.  Seriously?  Wow.  I mean it was a cool movie and all but... wow. Just... This must have been a readers poll, right?  Please tell me it was a readers poll.

Hi, I'm the greatest, most interesting, complex, and charismatic character ever created in film. I'm also Brad Pitt, wanna see my abs?

#3 The Joker (Dark Knight).

Classic case of people having the memory of a goldfish.  If this had come out a year earlier this would have been Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men.

#8 Captain Jack Sparrow.

Oh, but this makes sense. Yeah, twenty years from now everyone will talk about the Pirates of the Caribbean series and compare it to Star Wars and Indiana Jones, Die Hard.  Yeah, its just as good as those movies...

#16 Neo.

Yeah, cause Keanu Reeves is what everyone loved about the original Matrix movie.

#22 Ellis "Red" Redding (Shawshank Redemption)

Really?  I'm more surprised that anyone knew this character's full name than anything else.

War Games: Global Thermo-nuclear War Ain't What It Used To Be.

Back in the 80s the world was a much different place.  The economy was in shambles, leg warmers were cool, the Rolling Stones were still together, the threat of WWIII was always hanging out at the corner store... okay, so things aren't that different.  But there was at least one thing:  Matthew Broderick was the shit.

Back before he put on his Broadway tap shoes and danced around FDR's wheelchair or he put us all to sleep fighting Godzilla, he was the coolest kid not in school in a little flick I like to call Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  But even before he was destroying classic cars or disrupting obscure parades, he was nearly destroying-then saving all man-kind with a simple game of tic-tac-toe.

War Games (1983) is a completely awesome flick years ahead of its time in its incorporation of video gaming into modern Americana.  Its exciting, fun, and it even has some decent social commentary (not that I care, Blow those commies to the moon!).

Yet War Games never seems to get any love, outside of an occasional showing on nerd network, G4.  So I'm taking valuable time out of my very important jobless day to let the world know: War Games, you are hella underrated!