Saturday, October 01, 2005
"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
Metafilter brings us a bunch of great links to articles and trailers for Good Night and Good Luck, which opens next week.
People usually find the McCarthy Era pretty fascinating, but it's hard to make stuff like Senate hearings interesting on film. For the final project in my government documents class, I did an annotated bibliography of publications of the House Unamerican Activities Committee (or whatever it was called from 1940-1945; I had to limit it because of the sheer number of publications, and it changed names more often than the WPA ((which, to be fair, only changed names once)) ). Let me tell you, those hearings are deadly boring reading, no matter how many dramatic clips you've seen of an actor playing McCarthy thundering "ARE YOU NOW, OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN, A COMMUNIST?" This one looks really good, though, and there's an unapologetic political message that comes through even in the trailer, so it's sure to get bashed by assorted right-wing loonies as an attempt by Hollywood Liberals like George Clooney to make them look bad--as if they weren't doing just fine all by themselves on that score.
Okay, okay, I promise I won't go all Lileks and use my retro blog as a venue for amateur political analysis, the title of this post notwithstanding (and frankly, I'd feel even LESS justified in doing that if my retro and pop culture writing came anywhere near the exceptional quality of his). Instead, I'll just say that I think the black and white cinematography on this one looks awesome--I like black and white anyway, but even judging from my tiny little laptop screen it looks like they've done an outstanding job with light and shadow here. I can hardly wait to see it... although I know that when Mr. Vintage Reader gets back in town, the first movies on our list will be Serenity and Mirrormask.
People usually find the McCarthy Era pretty fascinating, but it's hard to make stuff like Senate hearings interesting on film. For the final project in my government documents class, I did an annotated bibliography of publications of the House Unamerican Activities Committee (or whatever it was called from 1940-1945; I had to limit it because of the sheer number of publications, and it changed names more often than the WPA ((which, to be fair, only changed names once)) ). Let me tell you, those hearings are deadly boring reading, no matter how many dramatic clips you've seen of an actor playing McCarthy thundering "ARE YOU NOW, OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN, A COMMUNIST?" This one looks really good, though, and there's an unapologetic political message that comes through even in the trailer, so it's sure to get bashed by assorted right-wing loonies as an attempt by Hollywood Liberals like George Clooney to make them look bad--as if they weren't doing just fine all by themselves on that score.
Okay, okay, I promise I won't go all Lileks and use my retro blog as a venue for amateur political analysis, the title of this post notwithstanding (and frankly, I'd feel even LESS justified in doing that if my retro and pop culture writing came anywhere near the exceptional quality of his). Instead, I'll just say that I think the black and white cinematography on this one looks awesome--I like black and white anyway, but even judging from my tiny little laptop screen it looks like they've done an outstanding job with light and shadow here. I can hardly wait to see it... although I know that when Mr. Vintage Reader gets back in town, the first movies on our list will be Serenity and Mirrormask.
permalink posted by The Vintage Reader @ 8:39 AM 
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