George Clooney's "Good Night and Good Luck"

Also, wallace & gromit is 94%. who the fuck would give a negative review to W&G? (aside from chaki)

Yeah. It was a chain-smoking civics lesson. Pretty good for a civics lesson. The best part was all the actual footage of McCarthy, really, since I'd only seen snippets of that.

Clooney is great. I'll see this at some point. Did anyone see his remake of Fail Safe (I didn't)? Because this looks like a similar approach, visually (er, from what I saw of it).

Quite a few. Good lectures, though. David Strathairn is really good.

Anyway, the movie was fairly good, occasionally excellent. Its brevity mitigated the suspicion that Clooney was fetishizing not just Ed Murrow and the period, but Courage, Decency, Fair Reporting, etc.

also, dig this: he's exec producer on the Keanu K. Dick movie coming out...

-- kingfish neopolitan sundae (jdsalmo...) (webmail), October 17th, 2005 3:46 PM. (kingfish 2.0) (link)

Um... I'm with andy. Few movies need updating less than that one.

oh man, me too. He somehow manages to be obsequious and excruciatingly self-important at the same time.

The jazz interludes were embarassing, and I think cutting out the opening and closing monologues would have made it stronger. With them, it's too pointed in taking aim at Bush, and Murrow is more ambiguous, morally, in the main part of the film.

- Showed how the simple fact that we all have secrets became a feature in the red-baiting; people fessed up fake secrets lest the light be turned on their real secrets.

- Didn't gloss over the male-dominated environment, as it showed how women - despite intelligence and involvement in the issues - didn't actually have a hand in the editorial content, and were sent to pick the papers up for the boys etc.

The Clarkson/Downey Jr. subplot was aimed at showing the repressive culture that people that obtained in the 50's along with the kind of paranoia, secrets and damage that it causes, like living in the closet was portrayed in the 80's.

The jazz interludes were an unbelievable waste of time. My gf pointed out that this would not have looked out of place on American Playhouse. Since it's a very simple plot told quickly, I got the impression that the music was intended not only to pad out the script but set the atmosphere too and make the whole thing a little less preachy.

Between PSH and Strathairn, who would you vote for for Best Actor?

I'll grant that it could very well be close to what they played in the period - but I don't think that in itself makes it a successful artistic choice. It was too sappy, too forceful, where the rest of the film was beautifully restrained.

Or Rosemary Clooney!

his speech abt the death of TV was corny, wincy (i'll assume it was at least drawn from an address murrow actually gave), and clooney allows a little window of humor in him being the only one NOT to know abt the office marriage. but the movie doesn't even try to show some kind of "inner life" or anything, meanwhile everyone around him has their inner lives blowing up all over.

killer moment: strathairn's glare after doing the liberace bit.

"The implication that one could have seen anything remotely like this on CBS TV on a regular basis during this era is more than a little fanciful. Clooney might defend it as atmosphere and as emblematic of the spontaneity of live TV, but it's so false it taints the more accurate details."

what exactly is wrong with fetishizing these things?

i liked this movie a lot, tho i wish there'd been a little more of it - esp of the army-mccarthy hearings. it ended a bit abruptly: the person i went with was like "so um whatever happened to mccarthy anyway?"

That's about right. But if Rosenbaum thinks the point was some mythologizing of a Golden Age, I think he's reading it wrong. It's an indictment of television, not a celebration of it. I think that point is getting lost in a lot of the reviews.

Clooney & Heslov have mentioned in interviews that they used the bit to highlight the extent of the kinda irrelevant pop fluff Murrow had to do to get his reports on the air(see also: Garland, Judy, interviewing of). That's why they show Murrow watching video of the Hearings while in the middle of conducting the interview. They've mentioned how they found that vid while digging thru Murrow's archives and figured it too perfect not to use.

also, "liberal homophobia"? this is different from "conservative homophobia" or "totalitarian homophobia"? why the use of the qualifier?

Cuz 'liberal homophobia' would be expressed by people who would frequently declare "I love them gays." Kinda like I'd as soon put Joe Biden on my dartboard as Bill Frist.

this is very OTM. the movie would've gotten pretty suffocating if not for those scenes, even tho they did get a little boring after the first two or three.

Liberace is considerably less ridiculous than Animal Collective. (Whether their personal life is as tragic I can't say.)

Blount, have you checked out Morbius' posts on the Brokeback Mountain thread?

Films both blount & I voted for in the 2000-04 poll:
Mulholland Dr., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Gleaners and I ... and we voted for different Tsai and Wong movies. I could've easily chosen Gosford Park, Yi Yi, 25th Hour or Spirited Away on a different day too.

It's a good thing you're not projecting, then. Again, is it possible at all that the (deadpan?) humor of the scene comes from the great absurdity of it all? That these guys were working on critical shit at a critical time, and we're shown Murrow trying to put on a brave face and whoring it out with this pop fluff?

I think the scene connects on the two different levels:

1) of the absurdity of doing such a massively absurd/irrevelant interview bit amidst a time of high drama

2) of what Tracer & M White mentioned above; the film's theme of the face you put on in public vs your actual visage. It goes with the married couple having to hide their marriage in their workplace, a bit that I thought was pretty blatantly emphasized(foregrounded?) early on, what with the conflating the hushed convo about both the loyalty oath and their marriage.

Someone else noticed (and quotes the relevant Armond White comments):

http://whinecoloredsea.blogspot.com/2005/10/cheap-laughs.html

i should clarify this by saying not just a time of high drama, but rather an entire film of pretty deep & heavy scenes. That this is a lighter moment is even more pronounced since it's such a contrast to the rest of the flick.

On another note, how many of the actual people protrayed died of lung cancer? I know that Murrow died from it only a handful of years after his final speech, but I'm wondering around the other folks. No one ever stops smoking!

lol i really liked the music interludes! i even thought of getting the soundtrack! im a sucker for cornball vocal jazz tho, as long as im convinced that its old cornball vocal jazz.

im all for interludes. the only other example i can think of is "head on" but thats a much better use of interludes.
i liked how this film was so weird in form. it was just nothing, there was nothing flashy, about it, it was just bang bang bang and its over. i guess the interludes were a lame way of making it a bit lighter, as noted above. i loved the way they were so token!

the only thing that grated was the downey jr thing - it was a bit heavy handed. the main device for indicating "these dudes have a secret" was - downey and his wife giving each other furtive glances. this is fine, we know as cinema goers that this means "somethings up with these two", but towards the end, we got about a million furtive glances. by the end, i thought there must be something seriously up, like they were mccarthys kids, or they were relaying everything back to the kremlin every night, or something.

i liked this, i dont think it should win an award, but i enjoyed actually really liking a film without thinking it was a very *good* film.

Even though the film is partly a criticism of modern TV's ball-lessness, could TV today achieve what Murrow did? Does anyone get the sorts of ratings he did? I've just seen it, and the setpieces of him filming are so strong that you can't but think that if everybody in the country sat down and watched him, say, break the Abu Ghraib thing, there'd be a lot less spinning about it and a lot more heads rolling. But does anyone have that sort of power anymore, when the people who don't want to hear it can just watch Fox?

the mise en scene is brilliant, claustrophic, contained, franternal, and with all of the shots looking at televisions, past televisions, like a fractal version of big brother...the scenes in offices, looking thru windows, past windows, windows on windows, geometric framing, reminded me of deeply of 50s paranoia, all that smoke and all that clatter...

the acting goes from excellent (straitharn, clarkson) to medicore (clooney) to what the fuck is he doing (downey jr)

the black and white shooting, the found footage, the cbs studio interiors, seduces us into thinking that it is a peroid peice, that it is about the good liberals triumphing over the evil conseratives, which would be odious enough as brain dead agit-prop, the liberals tragic nostagia for the past, and the not very subtle connections b/w george w bush's america and mccarthy's are so obvious, so cheap, and so dull.

syranina, messier, angrier, crazier, less contained and less constructed, falling apart at the seams, for me is a much more accurate, less clean and less neat contemp political movie...the desire to make the world neat, to make civic lessons and history lessons out of a situtation that is deeply problematic, and to make a saint from a man who was a good worker, and an honest intellectual, strikes me as a violation against murrow's spirit.

the not-so-secret marriage seemed the perfect counterpoint to the whole thing, this conflicted notion about the good and bad of lost values together, not taking place in real history, but a mythic history they were fighting to live in in the first place.

I don't get Robert Downey Jr. Except for Chaplin, I don't think I've ever seen him in something where he couldn't easily have been replaced by someone else, and yet there's always this big fuss about him like he's god almighty.

I thought this film kind of stunk. It gives you nothing you couldn't get from a documentary or book about the McCarthy era, and the drama was almost nil. The only thing Clooney seemed to have to say was "McCarthy bad, Edward R. Murrow awesome," a point made far better by Murrow's words themselves than anything Clooney wrote or directed into being.

I knew I was in for a snoozer when the film opened with, and lingered for quite a long time, on an awards dinner. This dinner gives us no real plot set-up, and then following the flashback it's much more of a plot slope than a plot arc - Murrow decides to take on McCarthy, he takes on McCarthy, and he wins. Who is he? What drives him? Does he have any doubts or concerns? Is there a beating heart under there? Does he ever say anything that isn't right and true and pure?

You may have a point, the dramatic structure was quite flat. However, I'd only vaguely heard of Murrow before seeing it, and found the film to be a very interesting introduction to this figure.

i liked it even though as you say there is no structure or plot whatsoever really

Yeah, I don't get all the critics who fell all over this. I didn't get any kind of feel for the main character - why should I care about him? He didn't seem like someone I could identify with? And what was up with the black and white - this is the 21st century! Anyway, this movie makes you think.

I think this came out while people in America still felt the Bush administration was being railed against about as much as McCarthy initially?

AH, WHEN LIBERAL MEN WERE MEN! SMOKIN AND DRINKIN TO JAZZ, TAKIN' NO GUFF.

also, why wasn't Clooney the star of this? he was just some 2-bit side player. I don't get that.

Because he wanted to make as good a film as possible and knew Strathairn would do a better job than him as Murrow?

it's possible he was only in front of the screen at all cuz it would be a draw.

sarcasm is dead

Ray Wise owns this movie.

Murrow decides to take on McCarthy, he takes on McCarthy, and he wins. Who is he? What drives him? Does he have any doubts or concerns? Is there a beating heart under there?

yeah, you maybe shoulda rented that johnny cash movie instead. i thought it was terrible too, there wasn't even a scene that showed how his work was affecting his family life. pshaw.

there wasn't even any scary music when the bad guy came on the screen, fer fucks sake.

we should anticipate his new one; jeffrey wright, philip seymour hoffman, clooney, i-am-still-not-sold-on-ryan-gosling, probably not just guys, also.

What would Gosling have to do, at this point, to sell you?

i think i just haven't seen him in anything much?, it's not an aggressive dislike or anything, more a reaction to him being v visible all of a sudden. i thought he was good in blue valentine but thought the movie was shitty, so that maybe fuels my ambivalence. like in this in particular, it's funny when actors play like journalists or staffers or anything that has that kinda loosened-tie costume, i guess i'm curious to see whether it'll be v regular-guy schtick.

Pretty convinced he could play Jon Arbuckle in a Garfield reboot and I'd still be impressed with his performance, at this point.

ah that's interesting (also well cast)
what would i watch if i wanted to investigate?

I'm probably not the best judge, since I always think he's better than his material. I was ready to give him an Oscar nomination for The Notebook.

i just scrolled through his imdb, there's a lot of funny kinda 'hercules jr' & 'are you afraid of the dark?' stuff. was ... wasn't the notebook that richard gere thing?

okay i am mixed up but i think i saw the poster & thought 'latter day richard gere vehicle'. is it good?

It's horrifyingly bad. But Gosling is fantastic in it.

ha, okay. i think i will probably wait & see him in this, but on account of your enthusiasm i'm psyched to do so. think i am maybe just suspicious of young sharp snappy actors.

really, lazily appending a new Cloonet film to this?

My fave Gosling performance is still The Believer.

i am all in favour of new-thread break-out enthusiasm for this film; cast is great, & this kind of smooth, cloon'd take on murky political underworlds - wag the dog &c - seems like something that studios can be okay at now

he's been around for a long time. the believer was 2001. i think he's bewitching.

a really long time, cf young hercules:

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSIU_tk_XEC4b5ZsXP0SXDJXZFFLCMdSuNj4Nfqe-A-vmAhO_H8

i feel bad for flaunting all your recommendations, here; i have still not found a satisfactory cost benefit analysis equation for sitting through one of his films just for the positive yield of his performance/radiance.

lol:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5PxZZuIh8OY

well done ryan gosling

buff bro dressed like old timey sailor barrels into group of people, breaks up non-fight

god, what a great ass

crazy stupid love was pretty good

his ass gave a superb performance

xxxp

yeah i assumed this was some kind of low quality performance art piece

watch yr back franco

^^^ I mean it

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/theater/george-clooney-broadway-good-night-good-luck.html

ive heard him say a version of this quote several times… notably, he used to say 80 instead of 90 iirc

Clooney is conscious of time passing. “I had this conversation with Amal when I turned 60,” he said. “I said, ‘Look, I can still play full-court basketball. I can still run around. I can still do pretty much everything I did when I was 30. But in 30 years, I’m 90. That’s a real number. My dad just hit that. And there are some things you’re not doing no matter how many granola bars you eat. I told Amal, ‘We have to focus on the next 20, 25 years of making sure that we’re jamming in everything we can.’ Not just work, because no one at the end of their life goes, ‘God, I wish I worked more.’”