DVD Tuesday Network The movie that took on trash TV three decades agoWith all the Oscar talk about veteran director Sidney Lumet 82 being snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences despite overwhelming accolades for his new Before the Devil Knows Youre Dead this seems a good time to revisit one of Lumets classics the 30-year-old denunciation of trash television Network I always remembered Network as broad and exagerrated but I saw it again a couple of years ago and boy was I wrong If anything its not wild enoughGolden Age of Television writer Paddy Chayefskys furious screenplay grew out of the 1970s-era push to shift network-news programs into the entertainment groups suddenly forcing them to compete with sitcoms game shows and soap operas for ratings and more importantly moneyVeteran New York newsman Howard Beale Peter Finch who won a well-deserved Oscar is unceremoniously given the boot after 25 years and loses it on air
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DVD Tuesday Ace in the Hole lays into the public appetite for sensation and the tabloid media machine that feeds it 55 years later nothing has changedSend your movie questions to FlickChickSee Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this weeks new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcastHear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide TalkAs soon as I got my first VCR I began waiting for Billy Wilders lacerating Ace in the Hole 1951 to come out on video Never happened And why its taken so long to come to DVD when you can choose from multiple editions of all manner of junk is one of lifes little mysteries But its finally here courtesy of the Criterion Collection so goodbye combing listings for the rare TV showing or ponying up for someone elses made-from-TV bootleg The anti-hero of Ace in the Hole which was also released as The Big Carnival and tanked under both titles is Charles Tatum Kirk Douglas a bastard of a disgraced big-city newspaperman looking for a way bac
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Question: Is there a point to having Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Tina Fey's 30 Rock on the same network? Studio 60 looks more interesting, although the ad campaign seems to focus on the Network rip-off — I mean, homage — than on Sorkin. 30 Rock seems much more based on real life, with Tracy Morgan basically playing himself. However, it seems baffling that we have two shows about a fictional Saturday Night Live debuting at the same time. What are their long-term prospects?
Answer: These are excellent questions, and ones we've asked ourselves (and NBC during the press tour) repeatedly. The only way we're going to get a real answer is to see how the public responds. The dilemma facing both shows is that the track record isn't exactly great for TV shows set in the world of TV (not even Sorkin's brilliant Sports Night, whose pilot I enjoyed more than Studio 60). To their credit, the shows don't feel remotely like each other. 30 Rock is a straight-out comedy/satire,
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Question: It seems that many critics are not happy with the Academy for failing to recognize Brokeback Mountain as the right film at the right time. What are some other famous snubs that the Academy is still embarrassed about? Thanks.
Answer: I personally think the Academy is shameless, and I've never ever heard — nor do I think I ever will — an official spokesperson concede that its membership made a big fat mistake giving the best-picture Oscar to one film rather than another. But I think there's a pretty overwhelming consensus among everyone else who cares that calling Ordinary People — a genuinely good movie, I hasten to add — the best motion picture of 1980 when it was up against Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, which is widely con
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I'm pretty sure I'm still dreaming. As far as I can tell, this dream started a year and a half ago, so it's actually still June 2004, it's 3:30 in the morning, and I "wake up" with the first scene vividly playing out in my head: His daughter's been arrested. This guy (I hadn't even come up with names yet) has to go pick up his teenage daughter at a police station, way down in Riverdale, in the middle of the night. What the heck was she doing in Riverdale?! He's worried to death. He's angry. He's scared. But more than anything... he's uncomfortable. He is a WASP, after all — they don't go to police stations. And certainly not in the middle of the night! By the time he gets her and his wife home, it's dawn; they have to get ready for church. As he sits alone in his car, he reaches for the biggest obstacle in his life right now — his Vicodin. Then... Smash Cut to: the Pulpit. He's a priest! That's it. That's my way in. I finally found my way into a world that's bee
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