the groundhog day project

The voiceover at the start of Network gives us like an entire other film's worth of plot. Howard Beale (Peter Finch) has just learned that he will be off the air in two weeks after his ratings have been in consistent decline of late. Also something about a problem with alcohol. He tells Max Schumacher (William Holden) that he will kill himself on the air, then he even announces it on the air. This movie came out in 1976. In 1974, talk show host Christine Chubbock had killed herself live on the air. Diana Christiansen (Faye Dunaway) who heads programming, wants to air footage of a bank robbery, filmed by a SLA-like group as they performed the robbery. She might even want to make a series out of it. "The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them." That's what a study Diana quotes says. And, I can't help but tie this into the present, the people who like Donald Trump as presidential candidate because "he says what I'm thinking....

So there I am, watching the trailer for Falling Down and I'm wondering a few things: 1) did every trailer in 1993 have really annoying voiceover? 2) sure, the film has moments that make it a very, very, very, very were people seeing it in the theater expecting an outright comedy about "urban reality"? 3) was this the perfect companion piece for / counterpart to Groundhog Day ? and 4) is this film--or rather the main character of D-FENS (Michael Douglas) just a metaphor for America... 5) I don't mean in an obvious, Americans are angry and fed up with all the bullshit problems in the modern world... 6) hell, I don't even mean that he's a stand-in for Ameri cans at all, but rather 7) he is America itself, and Falling Down can be mapped onto a sort of moral history of America. And, I'm not that impressed with America's morals lately, so this might turn into a rant. (Mal, you can check out now, because the word "patriarchy" might show up.) My...