Good Night, and Good Luck

Trailer just shown on the Daily Show, opens this Friday. The story of Edward R. Murrow taking on Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Senate Unamerican Activities Committee at the height of his power.



Given today's media complicity with bushco and the pending KKKarl Rove indictment, and DeLay's, an interesting time to release.

Official site - http://wip.warnerbros.com/goodnightgoodluck/



http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/reviews/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001053671

Good Night, and Good Luck

By Ray Bennett
Bottom line: Gripping slice-of-life docudrama.
This review was written for the festival screening of "Good Night, and Good Luck."

VENICE, Italy -- George Clooney's deeply felt docudrama "Good Night, and Good Luck" provides a snapshot of the moment in history in which a major American television personality named Edward R. Murrow took on the malevolent power of a muckraking U.S. senator named Joseph McCarthy and won. Shot in black and white in a brisk "you are there" 90 minutes, the film, which screened in competition, lovingly re-creates the studios and backrooms of 1950s New York journalism at the CBS television network, where the men wore white shirts and dark suits, the women fetched the coffee and the morning papers and everybody smoked all the time.

Clooney is the star name (as legendary producer Fred Friendly) in a fine ensemble cast featuring the previously unsung David Strathairn as Murrow, a career-defining role guaranteed to put him in the running for major awards. Murrow is deservedly the patron saint of broadcast journalism, and it's clear that Clooney and producer and co-writer Grant Heslov share that veneration. Moviegoers who know their American political history will respond to the film's immediacy and forgive the film's tight focus and narrow view. Anyone hoping for an entertaining drama about newsmen and politics along the lines of "All the President's Men" will be disappointed.

The film is framed by an excoriating speech given by Murrow in 1958 when he was saluted by the Radio and Television News Directors Assn. Television, he said, was "fat, comfortable and complacent" and was used to "detract, delude, amuse and insulate us." It's a message Clooney and Heslov obviously wish to reiterate. Murrow had become a star on radio, broadcasting from Czechoslovakia just before World War II and memorably from London during the Blitz. In the '50s, he and his partner Friendly adapted their radio news program "Hear It Now" to the new medium of television. The result was titled "See It Now," an evenhanded public affairs program that ran from 1951-58.

McCarthy had become notorious in 1950 for a speech in which he falsely claimed to have a list of people working for the State Department who were known to be members of the Communist Party. Later, as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, McCarthy targeted the military in the same witch-hunting manner. "Good Night" flashes back to the time when McCarthyism -- infamously fomented by the House Un-American Activities Committee -- had put a clamp on freedom of expression and association in the U.S.

more......

cause he's the closet thing to Morrow we've got

(he mentioned it the other night.) Proud to call Murrow my hometown boy -- we were both born in Greensboro, NC. :)

for Olbermann to be saying that..kinda channeling the King of newsmen, Edward R. Murrow!

Maybe even more so than "Farenheit 9/11". The problem is that it is playing nowhere in Maine. I have read many reviews, none of them have had a single bad thing to say about it. Grrrr.

Clooney for getting this all together NOW!

In this world of insanity that the bushwa is trying like hell to keep us in..you come out with a story about another madman in the 1950's who was slayed by the great dragonslayer, Edward R. Murrow!

If it's not on the first page, it doesn't get read!

kick

thank you

There’s little gravy in attacking Joe McCarthy in 2005, and that’s only a small part of what Clooney is up to. His real intention appears to be to deliver a blow to the patella of a conglomerate-controlled press corps that, until recently, has indulged the Bush Administration’s most extravagant smears and lies. He has completely succeeded.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/051010crci_cinema

speech on the Media was given a couple days ago.

As I was waking up, some time a little after 7 a.m. pacific time, CNN ran a trailer on this film. Then they had a clip of Kurtz saying how since 911 journalists have stopped questioning the powers that be. Then the two reporters at the CNN desk began making comments, with their heads almost down, essentially backing up what neo-con apologist Kurtz was saying in the clip, reflecting on the red scare and how journalists were too afraid to do their job, relating that with current events (their words were scarce & chosen, it was their body language that said it all).

I've been thinking about this all day. It blew me away to wake up to this. But then as I got up and began my day, the news kept true to the script and ran with the "terror!!!!" meme. Hmmm.