Good Night and Good Luck

Synopsis
This movie chronicles a brief period of time in the 1950’s when Edward R Murrow was able to rally his fellow journalists and take a stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his hearings on potential communists. The film is only about an hour and a half long and is entirely in black and white.

Observations
This was an OK movie. I wouldn’t watch it again, and I wouldn’t recommend that anyone runs out and purchases it, but if you’re walking by the local library and they have it to loan, I’d pick it up. The dialogue in the movie was excellent. However because the viewer is plopped right into the action, there is no back-story to help the viewer figure out who the key players were. But for me the worst part of the movie was the jazz singing interludes that came about every 20 minutes. Although Dianne Reeves's voice is excellent, the movie would come to a screeching halt to allow her to sign a few bars and then the movie would pick up again. I’m not sure what the purpose of this technique was but it made the movie seem choppy.

There is an excellent behind the scenes extra feature on the DVD that showcases Clooney talking about his interest in the film and journalism in general. However, the segment, like the movie, failed to identify who was talking on camera. I know that some of the people interviewed were children of Edward Murrow and Fred Friendly, and that the director was also interviewed, but it would have been nice to have some subtitling to help the viewer identify the interviewees. I was also a bit disappointed that the special features didn’t include any of the real editorials by Edward Murrow. I would like to have seen what the man looked like in action.

Rating:

Amazon's entry for Good Night and Good Luck