Good Night, and Good Luck

What the hell is this movie doing getting all these big time nominations for any award? It is not that good. Over the last few years there has been this disturbing trend amoungst all people who give out awards and that is to give all kinds of attention to boring "slice of life" movies. In the previous two years this was made evident by all the kudows for boring crap like Lost In Translation (the only thing worthy in that was in fact Scarlett Johanson) and Sideways. This year the trend took a slight turn in that the boring movie in question is actually a bit of a biopic.

The interesting thing here is that Good Night, and Good Luck tried to do the samething as Capote, which was to reveal a person through a very pivitol time in their life/career. However, where Capote worked so marvelously, Good Night, and Good Luck crashed and burned. There's just so much missing to keep it from being the movie it could have been. While I totally admire the people involved in for taking the risk of making this particular politically charged movie at this moment in time, they should have worked harder to make a more engaging story.

I'll discuss the unwarranted Oscar nominations in another post.


I will discuss a few things that some might considers spoilers so skip it if you don't want to know:


The stuff with Patricia Clarkson and Robert Downey Jr's characters was completely unnecessary. It's like it was there soley to emphasise the era in which the story took place and that was clear enough with out the whole thing of them being married but, hiding it because the company didn't allow it's employees to be married to each other. The part at the end when there were going to be lay-offs and the guy basically asked one of them to quit and save someone elses job was a waist of time and again not necessary.

The subplot with the character of Don Hollenbeck was also a bit of a distraction. While fine that guy killed himself and it happened at that time it didn't play out well. There were a couple reasons for this one it didn't really seem to impact the main players in the story enough to need so much screen time. And two since a lot of his issues came out of some newspaper guy named O'Brien it only caused more questions. It seemed like this O'Brien guy was out to get Hollenbeck for some reason but that reason was never disclosed and that became a distraction to the overall story.

The number onething that keeps this movie from being what it wanted to be is that there is no direct interaction between Murrow and McCarthy. Clearly that isn't something they could have just made up and thrown in the movie but, it is what is truly missing from the movie. When the hero and the villian don't come face to face in a movie it just doesn't work.



This was a movie that had all the right intentions but didn't come together right. The story itself would have been better served if they had just done it has a documentary. I saw it at a matinee and it definitely wasn't worth more than that. And really I'd recommend waiting for video if you really want to see it.