Eyes of Laura Mars

What a hoot! Watch this and tell me how long it takes *you* to recognize Tommy Lee Jones. Seriously. This is a classic 1970s thriller which puts all the fun back into thrillers - for those of us who have grown weary of seeing Jodie Foster or anyone else trapped on an airplane.

Faye Dunaway, once again. I'm becoming a fan of hers. In this movie she's so convincing as a photographer whose vision is interrupted constantly - even when she's behind the camera! - by the vision of murder, seen through the eyes of the murderer! Hold on models, stop posing! Stop the shoot! It's also great when Laura's fumbling around in her apartment, trying to feel her way to the telephone, as if blind! Meanwhile, with her eyes open, she's actually watching her friends be killed - one by one, and she can do nothing about it!

Mostly, this was just pure fun to watch. Fun to play "who's that actor" with some recognizable but much-younger faces. (It's like a reverse version of "where are they now?") Fun to get swept away by the pounding, overly melodramatic music score. Fun to watch Tommy Lee Jones running down the street in a typical 1970s chase scene. Really fun to laugh your head off at the close-up shots of Faye Dunaway's eyes. Yep. Get this one from Netflix. It's a joy.

Network

"We're mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore!"

Oh, so that's where that line came from!

What an incredible, scary, prescient, bizarre film this is. I almost don't know what to say. When I read the description I thought it would compare to "Broadcast News," another of my all-time faves. It did start out like that (the end of unchoreographed old-fashioned news reporting on television). But then, "Network" spirals downward into surreal, almost science-fiction, very dark territory more closely resembling a film like "Naked Lunch" than "Broadcast News." No kidding. It seriously freaked me out. But it got its point across. Everyone should watch it.

I've been on a bit of a Faye Dunaway kick lately, having also watched "Three Days of the Condor" and "Chinatown" (for a second time, each) within the past month. She's really something in "Network," though; I think it beats those other two performances by a landslide. She's gorgeous, robotic, driven, heartless and completely believable. She's raving, while having sex (!), about network television series ideas such as "the Mao Tse-Tung hour" featuring acts of terrorism by radical left-wing militants. The moment when William Holden tells her he can still feel emotions, he's got to leave her, she's nothing but a humanoid? Unforgettable. It feels so, so...True. So much like everybody I see around me all the time. What has television done to us?