Systemic Resources
Film
Network.
“Beale galvanizes the nation, persuading viewers to shout "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" from their windows. Soon afterward, Beale is hosting a new program called The Howard Beale Show, top-billed as "the mad prophet of the airwaves". Ultimately, the show becomes the most highly rated program on television, and Beale finds new celebrity preaching his angry message in front of a live studio audience that, on cue, chants his signature catchphrase…
When Beale discovers that Communications Corporation of America (CCA), the conglomerate parent of UBS, will be bought out by an even larger Saudi conglomerate, he launches an on-screen tirade against the deal and urges viewers to pressure the White House to stop it. This panics top network brass because UBS's debt load has made the merger essential for its survival. Beale meets with CCA chairman Arthur Jensen, who explicates his own "corporate cosmology" to Beale, describing the inter-relatedness of the participants in the international economy and the illusory nature of nationality distinctions.”
The Assistant.
The protagonist, Jane (Julia Garner), is a recent college grad who hopes to become a producer. The film explores how much she’s willing to compromise her ethics to climb the ladder of success.
Her boss tells her, “I’m tough on you because I’m gonna make you great,” The New York Times review, “Screaming on the Inside,” by Jeannette Catsoulis comments on how Garner makes “the slow draining of Jane’s soul almost visible... as she washes dishes in the break room, copies scripts, makes her employer’s travel plans and fields his phone calls. The ones from women are the trickiest.
Unfolding over one acutely distressing workday, ‘The Assistant’ is less a #MeToo story than a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment. That funk is breathed by everyone in a movie that strikingly pairs the executive’s demeaning actions with the stifling moral vacancy of the power structure that shields him... The spoor of the workplace predator is wearyingly familiar and as ubiquitous as offices themselves.”