Saw Good Night and Good Luck recently. Excellent movie. Beautiful to look at in black and white, the story is taut and told in punctuated chunks, interspersed with old kinescope footage; all together, it gives an interesting look into the ways life was different about fifty years ago. Appropriate to its subject matter, it has a sort of eyewitness, journalistic quality. George Clooney is clearly more than a pretty-boy actor, and while David Strathairn makes a believable Murrow, Clooney is a hell of a stretch for Fred Friendly.
The movie is not remotely subtle about the messages it is laying out–there are several–but they are messages that are worth telling.
It was especially interesting seeing the movie at this exact moment in history, when a right-wing government that is suspicious of its own citizens is just beginning to fall into disarray.
I wasn’t nearly as taken as Adam by “Good Night and Good luck”. Sure, it was a wonderful piece of black and white cinematography, but it was missing “something”. Perhaps it was missing a certain tension…I found it difficult to actually care for any of the folks in the film. It felt more like a “docu-drama” sans drama.
Still, it is by no means a bad film, just a film that may be considered something a bit less than the sum of its parts.