 A film in three minutes. Network. Tired of life? Sick of politics? Think the world is taking a turn for the worst? Or maybe you're just as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore? Well, you're not alone. In fact, someone else beat you to the punch, and he even got his own film made. That person is Sidney Lumet, and his film is the 1976 masterpiece, Network. Set in the decaying New York City of the 1970s, the story follows veteran news anchor Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, who learns that he is being fired from his job at the UBS Evening News due to low ratings. During his farewell broadcast, Beale goes into a lengthy, angry tirade about the state of the world and how empty and meaningless life is, causing UBS's ratings to spike. Due to this, Beale is given his own show, where his rants about the decline of the American way of life earn him a massive, cult-like following from his viewers. Turning Beale from straight-laced newsman to newly discovered messiah, who eventually comes into conflict with the very same network executives who propped him up. During script development, writer Paddy Chayefsky originally penned Network as a comedy, hoping to construct a satirical look at the way the newsrooms picked, edited and broadcasted news stories. But instead, Network's genius lies in how it portrays a much more cynical, yet at the same time realistic vision of the news world and the people who work in it. A world where shows, stories and individuals can be reduced to a simple rating share or profit margin. Peter Finch excels at playing the angry news anchor, using what would be the last of the actor's energy to deliver one of the most iconic monologues in cinema history. 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're 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-built and radios and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone. Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore. Finch's performance would earn him the Academy Award's first ever posthumous Oscar for best actor, as he would die of a heart attack just weeks before the ceremony, making him one of only two actors to ever win posthumously. But what makes Network still relevant 44 years after its original release is how disturbingly accurate Beale's rants about society have become. His criticisms on the economy, the environment, workers' rights, the media and much more have all been proven to be true, and indeed have only gotten worse with the passing of time. What might have been seen by some as satire upon the film's original release has become a deeply depressing portrait of the real world as we know it today. And the way in which Beale is eventually dealt with by the higher ups of UBS perhaps shows us that we as the audience and as a society have moved beyond redemption, preferring the lives we see on the television to actually having to think for ourselves.