CyberMouse Friday, October 28, 2005: Here is a review of two new films on journalist written in McLeans’ Magazine a Canadian Weekly. October 28, 2005For the sake of the storyTwo movies flesh out journalist stereotypes of predator and crusaderBRIAN D. JOHNSONMovies about journalists tend to depict them as crusaders or predators. Take your pick: the nobility of Robert Redford's Watergate sleuth in All the President's Men versus the hypocrisy of William Hurt's TV interviewer shedding crocodile tears in Broadcast News. Either way, the portrayals don't ring true. The problem is, reporting isn't all that exciting; it's mostly typing and phone calls. But two of the season's best new movies -- Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck -- manage to distill potent drama from the lives of legendary journalists, while maintaining a veracity worthy of their subjects.They are two men who changed the course of journalism. In 1966, Truman Capote, the novelist and screenwriter famous for Breakfast at Tiffany's, published In Cold Blood, a "non-fiction novel" that, for better or worse, tried to elevate journalism to a literary art. In 1954, CBS anchorman Edward R. Murrow challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunt with a moral authority that set the bar for future generations of TV newsmen, from Walter Cronkite to Bill O'Reilly. Both films are about trust. They're small pictures by Hollywood standards, intimate dramas with lean scripts focused on a defining episode in their subjects' lives. And they're built on shrewd, riveting performances, not by movie stars but character actors. One plays a snake, the other a saint, yet in both cases there's a world of nuance behind the eyes. Capote is about the snake. Perfecting his subject's pinched voice and fey, soft-spoken wit, Philip Seymour Hoffman reincarnates the writer with an eerie precision that goes beyond impersonation. Directed by Bennett Miller, and based on Gerald Clarke's biography, the film focuses on the five-year, death-row rapport that Capote established in a Kansas prison with Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), one of two men who slaughtered a Kansas farm family in 1959. The urbane writer seduces his story from the naive killer with cold-blooded intent. Their scenes play like therapy sessions, with a homoerotic undercurrent, and they go to the core of journalism's dark art. (Screenwriter Dan Futterman says he was influenced by Janet Malcolm's book The Journalist and the Murderer, about killer Jeffrey MacDonald, who won an out-of-court settlement after suing writer Joe McGinniss for feigning sympathy to write a hatchet job.)Capote has a dilemma. He needs to keep the killers alive through appeals long enough to get the story; but for the ending, he needs to see them hang. What's brilliant about the film is how our sympathy shifts from Capote to Perry, then back to Capote, a man in anguish who's sold his soul for his art.Good Night, and Good Luck tells a more inspirational tale, of a TV newsman risking his career to debunk the Red Scare. Shot in black and white, and directed by George Clooney -- who plays Murrow's CBS producer Fred Friendly -- the film conjures the early days of television with stark realism. But it resonates with current concerns that the U.S. is sacrificing democratic freedoms in the name of national security. Substitute "terrorist" for "Communist," and the Cold War bogeyman is suddenly topical: "We cannot defend freedom abroad," Murrow warns, "by hurting it at home."Documentary realism keeps Good Night from collapsing into a morality tale. McCarthy plays himself, in hair-raising video footage from his witch-hunt hearings. And most of Murrow's lines are lifted from his own scripts. Superbly played by David Strathairn, Murrow makes anxiety charismatic, chain-smoking on and off the air (between ads for Kent cigarettes). And he emerges as a prophetic figure. Forced to mix serious news with celebrity interviews (Liberace), he's alarmed that TV will degenerate into pap. "If this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate," he intones, "it is merely wires and lights in a box." It's sobering to watch a movie about the dawn of television and realize it was enjoying an unfiltered literacy that it would never regain. Unknown // 11:07 PM ______________________ Two students in my Advanced writing class have sent me sound (audio files) and all of you can do it. Your assignment for week after next is a printed copy of a web page that you have designed and you should try and send me a audio file as well. Send the file to carsurf@dragon.email.ne.jp Good Luck. See you in two weeks but hope to 'hear' from you before then. Clark Unknown // 6:26 PM ______________________
Here is a review of two new films on journalist written in McLeans’ Magazine a Canadian Weekly. October 28, 2005For the sake of the storyTwo movies flesh out journalist stereotypes of predator and crusaderBRIAN D. JOHNSONMovies about journalists tend to depict them as crusaders or predators. Take your pick: the nobility of Robert Redford's Watergate sleuth in All the President's Men versus the hypocrisy of William Hurt's TV interviewer shedding crocodile tears in Broadcast News. Either way, the portrayals don't ring true. The problem is, reporting isn't all that exciting; it's mostly typing and phone calls. But two of the season's best new movies -- Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck -- manage to distill potent drama from the lives of legendary journalists, while maintaining a veracity worthy of their subjects.They are two men who changed the course of journalism. In 1966, Truman Capote, the novelist and screenwriter famous for Breakfast at Tiffany's, published In Cold Blood, a "non-fiction novel" that, for better or worse, tried to elevate journalism to a literary art. In 1954, CBS anchorman Edward R. Murrow challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunt with a moral authority that set the bar for future generations of TV newsmen, from Walter Cronkite to Bill O'Reilly. Both films are about trust. They're small pictures by Hollywood standards, intimate dramas with lean scripts focused on a defining episode in their subjects' lives. And they're built on shrewd, riveting performances, not by movie stars but character actors. One plays a snake, the other a saint, yet in both cases there's a world of nuance behind the eyes. Capote is about the snake. Perfecting his subject's pinched voice and fey, soft-spoken wit, Philip Seymour Hoffman reincarnates the writer with an eerie precision that goes beyond impersonation. Directed by Bennett Miller, and based on Gerald Clarke's biography, the film focuses on the five-year, death-row rapport that Capote established in a Kansas prison with Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), one of two men who slaughtered a Kansas farm family in 1959. The urbane writer seduces his story from the naive killer with cold-blooded intent. Their scenes play like therapy sessions, with a homoerotic undercurrent, and they go to the core of journalism's dark art. (Screenwriter Dan Futterman says he was influenced by Janet Malcolm's book The Journalist and the Murderer, about killer Jeffrey MacDonald, who won an out-of-court settlement after suing writer Joe McGinniss for feigning sympathy to write a hatchet job.)Capote has a dilemma. He needs to keep the killers alive through appeals long enough to get the story; but for the ending, he needs to see them hang. What's brilliant about the film is how our sympathy shifts from Capote to Perry, then back to Capote, a man in anguish who's sold his soul for his art.Good Night, and Good Luck tells a more inspirational tale, of a TV newsman risking his career to debunk the Red Scare. Shot in black and white, and directed by George Clooney -- who plays Murrow's CBS producer Fred Friendly -- the film conjures the early days of television with stark realism. But it resonates with current concerns that the U.S. is sacrificing democratic freedoms in the name of national security. Substitute "terrorist" for "Communist," and the Cold War bogeyman is suddenly topical: "We cannot defend freedom abroad," Murrow warns, "by hurting it at home."Documentary realism keeps Good Night from collapsing into a morality tale. McCarthy plays himself, in hair-raising video footage from his witch-hunt hearings. And most of Murrow's lines are lifted from his own scripts. Superbly played by David Strathairn, Murrow makes anxiety charismatic, chain-smoking on and off the air (between ads for Kent cigarettes). And he emerges as a prophetic figure. Forced to mix serious news with celebrity interviews (Liberace), he's alarmed that TV will degenerate into pap. "If this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate," he intones, "it is merely wires and lights in a box." It's sobering to watch a movie about the dawn of television and realize it was enjoying an unfiltered literacy that it would never regain. Unknown // 11:07 PM
Two students in my Advanced writing class have sent me sound (audio files) and all of you can do it. Your assignment for week after next is a printed copy of a web page that you have designed and you should try and send me a audio file as well. Send the file to carsurf@dragon.email.ne.jp Good Luck. See you in two weeks but hope to 'hear' from you before then. Clark Unknown // 6:26 PM
