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Touches You

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Boy, that was very different of what I usually see and it was awesome! And how come I never ever heard of this film before? Thank you IMDb for always making me curious about everything presented here, because if it wasn't for a few researches on EMMY nominees and awards of 1983 I wouldn't be able to know and see "Special Bulletin", a truly special film that deserves more views from all kinds of public.And who could have thought that the minds behind this film is the team Edward Zwick & Marshall Herskovitz, famous for films such as "Blood Diamond" and "Defiance" and many others? "Special Bulletin" is a TV film released in 1983 telling a fictional (but told in a very realistic way) news coverage of a terrorist group who took over the control of a ship, made a few hostages (including a reporter and a cameraman) with one demand: or the government release all the nuclear devices they had control in Charleston, South Carolina, or they will detonate a nuclear bomb in the city. The whole film is presented as a news coverage coming from New York with two anchors (played by Ed Flanders and Kathryn Walker), and they present the situation inside the boat; other reports digging more and more about the characters of the situation, who they are and what they want. It is an hour and half picture that seems to go longer (in a good way) because you get hold to the whole thing, and it looks like a news report that you can't let go. Everything looks real. Well, almost everything. There's a few goofs, few details that makes you realize that this is only a movie and people in the 1980's got very impressed with the material that the producers had to include in a few parts some notes informing that the whole thing wasn't happening, it was fiction. A few things that makes of "Special Bulletin" a real bulletin: Everything was filmed on video, with those old cameras that couldn't film properly at night without making a giant flash ruining the image (remember those images coming from the news? If you don't, look on the internet from news images of that decade, you're see what I'm talking about); the editing, the sound effects with noise problems, things that happens in live coverage, the relative unknown cast (now, we can recognize names like Lane Smith, David Clennon and David Rasche and there's a hilarious scene with Michael Madsen). What makes of this film unrealistic: some of the reactions presented in the whole situation seems forced (e.g. the guy with the machine gun walking outside of the boat looked so much like an actor playing a scene; and the anchors talks in some parts, it wasn't too natural). But it's nothing that ruins the experience of watching it.I was surprised by the quality of this film, how every single thing works perfectly, from the great tension of the story to the actors performances; it really makes you look through a complete report that goes unfolding in front of you. The coverage made by the reporters in all of the country was interesting, you can see how news are made in such short time through investigations, live reports that goes on and off so fast, and the anchors have to figure out a way of telling everything to its audience, and more and more things are coming in the way, and they deal in a tragical situation (reserved to the last shocking minutes of the film).Even today there's a gigantic impact while watching, and I'll probably never forget this wonderful experience. 10/10

I had this movie on VHS and thought it was a great practical joke to play on people by putting it on before they came in so they just thought it was background noise only for them to hear the "We interrupt this program for a special bulletin" and watch the fun begin.Of course as the years progressed, the joke lost its power because the look is so 80s and the USSR is no longer a threat.The main storyline is one of a group of terrorists, who do not think of themselves as such, trying to get everyone's attention to what a full scale nuclear attack can do. They take a news anchor and camera man hostage and tell their story to the world. Their message is totally missed in the glitz of the media's usual antics such as fancy graphics and theme music to the crisis instead of just focusing on the crisis itself.This should be seen by anyone taking a journalism course and those critical of the mainstream media would get a kick out of it.

I can remember watching the original broadcast of this movie when I was thirteen, while the word DRAMATIZATION flashed across the screen literally every three minutes (very annoying). I finally managed to track down a copy a few weeks ago, one mercifully free of all the disclaimers, and sat down expecting to enjoy a nostalgic, not very scary eighties kitsch-fest.Well, I'm shocked to say I was wrong--despite the dated clothing, hairstyles and screen graphics, Special Bulletin holds up amazingly well twenty-two years later. The suspenseful, quickly-moving plot and the acting, quite good for a TV movie, pull you right into the action (it helps that in this era of terrorism and dirty bomb fears, you can't dismiss the whole scenario as Cold War paranoia), and even though I remembered every twist and turn of the story, the ending and how it came about was still a punch in the gut. As other reviewers have noted, there's an element of dark, Network-like satire playing right alongside the nuclear-countdown tension (remember Jessica Savitch, anyone?--the actress playing the lead female newscaster has all her little expressions and vocal tics hilariously down pat), and not surprisingly the "official concern" expressed by the news team doesn't seem the least sincere until reality suddenly, horrifyingly smacks them in the face.Also not surprisingly, in light of recent news events in another picturesque Southern city, the federal government's first response to the terrorist crisis is, "That's Charleston's problem," and when they finally do get the picture they 1) baldly lie to the public about the danger they're in and 2) don't have the slightest idea what to do to stop it. (The scenes of the "official" evacuation becoming a parking lot, fistfights and food running out almost instantly at an evacuee shelter are so Katrina- and Rita-like that it's eerie.) And where's the president during all this? God only knows. Apparently, the creators of this movie were ahead of their time in more ways than one.In conclusion, if you can in fact find a copy (selling secondhand on Amazon for nearly a hundred dollars!), this movie is well worth your time. I still have a hard time believing that anybody was really fooled into thinking this was real--it's an impressive fake newsroom, but it's still obviously fake--but if you enjoy plot-driven suspense with a chilling apocalyptic twist, or just want to remember those thrilling days of Mutually Assured Destruction, you'll enjoy this. And then the producer and writer went on to create Thirtysomething, of all things, so go figure.

I saw about the last 20 minutes of a rerun at about 3am, without the precautionary warnings used in the original airing, and still remember how believable and intensely effective the movie was. Based on what I saw of it and remember after about 15 years [I probably saw this in the late 80s or very early 90s], very well done. I might even add it to my "to rent" list so I can see the whole thing :-). I even woke my grandfather [I was living in his house at the time] to ask him if we knew anyone in Charleston. Once we worked out that it had only been a movie, he was sympathetically amused. His sister had been taken in by the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, so he apparently readily understood how easy it had been for me to be confused by an apparent newscast with no commercials or warnings.