The Red Scare of the late 40’s and early 50’s was the product of fear and cowardice. Fear of the American public and cowardice of it’s leadership. Senator Eugene McArthy capitalized on this moment to destroy lives and to send America to precipice, before courageous people were able to pull America back from the brink.

One of those individuals who helped America pull back from the brink of mass hysteria was Edward P. Murrow. At least I suppose he was one of those heroes. In the film Good night and good luck we are sent back into the past to watch the events of that era. It’s unclear from the film, however, what we are watching. Are we watching the journalistic process? Are we watching good fight evil? Are we watching a couple caught in the wierd rules that CBS had about married couples? Are we watching George Clooney shoot a black and white film for his final thesis in his directing masters?

The film focusses on a set of critical broadcasts, Murrow’s attack on McArthy and McArthy’s attack on Murrow. By shooting the entire film in black and white (technically: The film was shot on color film on a grayscale set, then color-corrected in post) and using original footage, the impact and drama of those broadcasts is not lost. What is lost is why did Murrow do it. What motivated him to attack McArthy? Why did he, unlike everyone else, go out on a limb to attack a madman? The film suggests that it was his own natural outrage, but then why did he feel so outraged? Or was it that he was a great journalist and like all great journalists saw that there was a great story to be told?

We’ll never know.

And that’s the problem with this film. At no point do we understand why Murrow did what he did, and at no point do we get a feeling for why what he did was so important and at no point do we get the drama of what he did. Instead we see a collection of journalists pursuing a story against a madman using TV to destroy his reputation.

Ironically, Edward P. Murrow’s main contribution may not have been his attack on McArthy, but his persuasive demonstration that by editing and cutting footage you can construct a case proving anything. From the See It Now episode on McArthy there is a direct line to Michael Moore’s Farhenheit 9/11 and television’s Survivor. The message is no longer controlled by the speaker but by the editor of the message.

Maybe the soundbite culture emerged when McArthy blew it on television.

As a film, it’s an interesting exercise in directing skills, but the story is best read on your favourite web site where more color and texture can be added to the tale.

In a year of weak movies, this may have squeaked by because the Academy is always impressed with someone telling them how heroic they are, and because Clooney as a director did a good job.

The Constant Gardener, is a movie based on the book written by John LeCarre. John LeCarre was cast adript by the end of cold war, much like the Easter Bloc. Fortunately, the Eastern Bloc transformed itself to a better place, John LeCarre did not.

The problem with the book is that half is a flashback, followed by a story in the present. The flashback starts when the wife, Tessa Quayle, of the protagonist, John Quayle, is found raped, and murdered on a road in Kenya. Initially we suspect the mysterious Kenyan doctor that she hanged out with, but he is too virtuous to convince anyone but the characters trapped in LeCarre’s book. The second half is the explanation of why Tessa had to die. And being an annoying activist trying to save the world is not a good enough explanation. It takes about 15 minutes to understand that there is an evil conspiracy involving drugs, the government and money. The horror! The horror!
The agonizing exposition of the wife’s work reminds me of Ralphe Fienne’s other work (The English Patient) with it’s soft light, unbearable slow pace, pointless sex scene involving and demure and quiet vocals (my speakers were maxed out and I could still not hear them or was I nodding off?). Once the exposition is complete we turn to the present moment. It’s 1944… oops wrong movie.

In fact it’s the 1990’s and the big pharmas are trying to make a quick buck by doing TB tests in Africa where simple things like clinical trials don’t have the same controls as they do in the US or Western Europe. Thanks to those clinical tests, the drugs will be adopted in Europe in time to save us from the coming TB plague! Why? Because the tests will doctored up just enough.
So wait. This movie ignores basic science and process around how drugs go to market and reflects society’s ongoing ambivalence of how drugs are manufactured. The basic science infuriates me, the ambivalence irritates. For how drugs actually get tested and the kinds of process that are involved check out the FDA’s website.

But for the ambivalence, let me stress, that as part of the development of drugs, people die, little fuzzy animals die, and some people make a lot of money. It’s a faustian pact that allows our lives last a little longer on the backs of thousands of dead lives both in the animal and human kingdom. Some of the folks who die or suffer do so under informed consent, and others do it for a fast buck and others because of their location in the food chain. But the reality is that without clinical trials, we would never have invented the millions of drugs we do have.

And if you want to understand the imapct on our lives, watch Lost. Everytime you got cut before antibiotics were invented you died. Think about that. Every single time. In the first world war, the survival rate for abdomen wounds was 1%.

So big pharma should make money. And we should encorage them to make even more money. And we should think that for the most part there are watchmen watching the watchmen.

But all of that subtlety is lost in this film. Instead it’s bad evil corporations trying to make even more money in the drug lotteries of this messed up world. Oh and the sad tale of love found and lost and death and the circle of life.
Pass on this one.

The ongoing saga of the wizard and his charming little friends continues. The story is well known. Harry ends up at hogwarts, Voldemort concots a bizarre, convuluted plot to get Harry to do something absurd, Harry partially foils the trap and the scooby gang of Hermione and Ron help Harry wherever they can.

Spoiler so please skip next paragraph.

In this installment of the story, Voldemort, concots the most elaborate scheme of them all. He gets Harry to enter the Triwizard contest, helps Harry win the contest, just so Harry can grab the Triwizard trophy and end up at graveyard where his blood is the key secret ingredient to finally bringing Voldemort all the way back.

End of spoiler.

Amazingly this plot took JK Rowling more than 100 pages to write. Further confirming my wife’s comment that within each book there is a good book.

As for myself, I am not a Potter fan. I find the books to be poorly written nonesense that might amuse children, but can not be called literature, more like trashy fiction for the under 12 set.

But the movies, are a different story. The movies are flights of fancy where the visuals can collapse hundreds of pages of description into seconds of screen panning. The characters continue to have a vitality and energy. The story continues to amuse, as long as you avoid thinking at all too deeply.

One discordant note, the computer graphics in this installment, were not as good as they could have been. For a movie that makes a billion dollars, they could have tried harder to get their water effects to look more real. But maybe I am being churlish. This is fantasy, not reality and who am I to say what a carriage full of girls being pulled by Pegasi looks like…