Excerpts from Electric Degeneration, Degenerate Press' semi-weekly e-zine, free and ad-free. A full episode contains sections for music reviews, upcoming events, blasphemy, classifieds, and anything else we feel like saying. If you'd like to subscribe just contact us.
You can surf the entire archive.
10/19/2005
FILM FLAM
Caught a preview screening of George Clooney's biopic of Edward Murrow this
week, Good Night, and Good Luck. It's shot in black and white, which works
perfectly with the stock footage and clips of TV from the time period and brings
a nice starkness to the visuals. It's also stark in setting, shot almost
entirely in the offices and studios of CBS (or at least sets done up to look as
such) and the camera is always a bit too close to the subjects, perhaps in an
effort to create a mood of cold war McCarthyism confinement. The pacing is a bit
slow as well, giving scenes a bit of weight but unfortunately it works against
the feeling that those were desperate times for some.
It almost works, but not quite. We get a little impression of just how scared
McCarthy had people in the entertainment and political arenas. Worse, we don't
get anything about the film's human subject, Murrow. He is portrayed as the
first reporter to make a stand, but we aren't shown why he decides to do so. We
don't see how it impacts his life, other than long hours at the office, or even
any hint as to who the man is outside of work. I've gotten better pictures of
the time period from TV documentaries, and better dramas from soap operas. It
fails in both respects.
This film has gotten a lot of critical buzz, but I think it's in large part due
to the importance of the story rather than the skill of execution, and because
it's about journalists. You'd think journalists would want stories about
journalists to be more interesting, but when journalists see journalists being
portrayed as honest, hard-working people on the side of right it's hard to
believe journalists are going to give an objective review.
I enjoyed seeing a rich black and white picture on the big screen. And the story
has so much relevance today you could easily substitute "terrorist" for
"communist" and make it a modern tale.
Rather than an important tale told not-so-well, Capote is a not-so-important tale told well. Where Good Night and Good Luck fails to illuminate the main character, Capote gives you a wide range of emotions portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman. You don’t get much on his background, but you do understand his motives in the time portrayed in the film. It, too, suffers from a slow pace but this is one of those films that isn’t about events as much as it is a character study. Masterfully done, really, but you have to appreciate acting and have the patience for a lack of action to enjoy it.
On the other point of the three-cornered spectrum of movies this
week is Doom, an utterly unimportant story told incredibly poorly. I almost
understand the idea of making movies from video games. Heck, they’ve trolled the
depths of TV, remade every film in the history of film, then made sequels to the
remakes - why not throw in the towel and just rip a "script" off a 10 year old
video game? The Rock can’t act and you don’t really care about any of the
characters. The effects aren’t even that great and why bother to go over the top
with violence and cursing and get an R rating without showing some boobs? C’mon,
this film is targeted at males who played video games a decade ago, we want some
titties! Feh. It’s basically a crappy version of Aliens. The folks at
aintitcoolnews.com have a perfect review of this steaming pile, if you ain’t
heard enough:
www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=21598
 |
Take
me to Degenerate Press' home page! All content on this site is owned by Degenerate Press and cannot be used without our permission. We have lawyers for friends with nothing better to do than cause trouble (no kidding), so play nice. Copyright © 2005, All Rights Reserved |