Bleak Week
Greetings all,
I hope you got a chance to experience “Good Night and Good Luck” on CNN and Max. I had hoped it would be on HBO MAX if you missed it, but unfortunately, that is not the case. I watched the original film before the screening, and the live show was very similar to the film. There was a good montage at the end of the play to catch us up to the moment of how TV news has served and not served us.
After the show, Anderson Cooper led a discussion, which really infuriated me. They talked about people trusting news and other issues, but they did not (as long as I was watching it, in the version I saw, it just cut off) mention Fox “News.” Of course, I put the news in quotes because most of what they say is a lie. What Fox does is precisely what McCarthy did. They make accusations without any proof. If Murrow were alive today, he would, of course, go after Trump, but he would expose the misrepresentations of Fox.
If you did not see it, you can catch it here.
Indeed, we live in bleak times. One way to deal with the bleakness is to go deeper into it by going to Bleak Week (yes, that is a thing). Bleak Week , Cinema of Despair, has been going on for four years. It is a program of the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles and plays in three theaters there. This year, it is traveling to seven cities in the USA, and the Texas Theatre is one of them. In LA, they are showing 55 depressing films; here in Dallas, we will have seven starting Monday, June 9th. My recommendations are “Dogtooth,” “Synecdoche, New York,” and “Killer of Sheep.”
While watching a film on Amazon Prime, a commercial popped up at a seemingly random time in the film. This really pissed me off. It took me out of the moment. It is unlike broadcast TV, where the writers and directors structure the show to work with these breaks. When broadcasting started, the British had the BBC, which had no commercials, but people had to pay for it. Of course, here in the US, it was ad-supported, thus starting the two ways media is paid for. But here we are paying for the service and putting up with ads. Ads are now everywhere on YouTube, social media, Billboards, etc. There is probably an ad near you right now. We have to train ourselves not to pay attention, to selectively tune out, which means that perhaps something we do want to see, we might miss. It is also good for us to learn how to use media literacy techniques to decode ads. Here is a good place to start.
Last week, I had the opportunity to see a preview of “The American Revolution,” a six-part, 12-hour series on that war by Ken Burns. What makes this series different for him is that there is no visual archival or photographed media, which forms the basis of most of his work. More on that as it gets closer to its fall release. For another take on the American Revolution, you might want to check out Dr. Heather Cox Richardson’s new video series on the American Revolution. You can see that here.
On Monday the 15th, the Angelika Theater is showing Sunset Boulevard at 4 and 7 p.m. I have not seen “The Phoenician Scheme,” the new Wes Anderson film, but I am sure it is worth seeing, and I hope to see it soon. Another film worth seeing is “When Dallas Rocked,” the documentary by Kirby Warnock, that tracks the Dallas music scene from the 50s to the 70s.
Lastly, if you live in DC or know someone who does, there is a great documentary film festival in DC called DC DOX. Here is a schedule of the great films showing there.
-Bart
George Clooney is no stranger to either live TV or “speaking truth to power.” Both were on full display Saturday night on CNN, which for the first time in history carried a live, commercial free telecast of a Broadway play. “Good Night and Good Luck” basically went off seamlessly, with Clooney in the driver’s seat as Edward R. Murrow, who took on Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy during the height of his Communist witch hunt powers. Cowed he wasn’t. Today too many journalists and their corporate bosses can’t say as much.
Clooney also dared to tell the truth about President Biden’s mental deterioration after his longtime friend and political ally initially didn’t recognize him at a star-studded Hollywood fundraiser. His Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, written in the face of strong objections from several of Clooney’s Hollywood friends, turned out to be the first key building block in the growing move to stop Biden’s bid for a second term. Clooney felt it had to be done, even though it made him heartsick.
Many have forgotten, but Clooney also was the driving force behind CBS’ live remake of “Fail Safe” back in 2000. Spun off the same-named 1964 feature film and shown in black-and-white, the CBS adaption featured one of the most exemplary casts in TV history. Clooney had a supporting part in league with Richard Dreyfuss (as the President), Harvey Keitel, Sam Elliott, Don Cheadle, Noah Wyle, Brian Dennehy, James Cromwell and Hank Azaria. Add Walter Cronkite to that list as the remake’s host.
In 1997, Clooney returned to the live TV format as the principal star of NBC’s “ER” in its fourth season premiere. It drew 42.7 million viewers, the biggest audience ever for a drama series premiere.
Clooney’s affinity for live television (the norm during TV’s so-called “Golden Years”) dates to his formative years watching his father, Nick Clooney. Now 91, the senior Clooney had a long career as a local TV news anchor. And during his various tenures, he was never afraid to speak his mind in times when “speaking truth to power” had yet to enter the common vernacular.
George Clooney is likewise uninhibited, even when it goes against the grain. Two decades ago he directed the big-screen’s acclaimed “Good Night and Good Luck” movie. There has never been a better time for a remake.
-Ed
Howdy,
My watchlist has been busted lately, and the only “content” I have been ingesting is 2000s rom-coms like the Lindsey Lohan vehicle “Just My Luck,” about a lucky 30-something marketing girl boss who swaps her fortune with an unlucky pre-Star Trek Chris Pine, also heavily featuring British boyband McFly. Also on the docket has been several children’s films, including the “Lilo and Stitch” animated trilogy, which was mostly straight-to-Disney Home Video low-budget endeavors.
Also streamed was the terrible Lionsgate film series “Now You See Me,” which has another two-film theatrical release set of sequels coming out later this year. Lionsgate is desperate to sell them to anyone, so they recently spun off their streaming service Starz, famed for the “Outlander” historical romance series and producer 50 Cent’s “Power” tv shows.
Now to ready themselves for a sale, they’ve been releasing some of the worst films to ever be produced, including the singer The Weeknd’s album concept film “Hurry Up Tomorrow” and last year’s remake of “The Crow.” Amidst these releases are their “franchise” films, including spin-offs of their moderately successful “Hunger Games” films and last weekend’s “John Wick” spinoff “Ballerina,” which was reshot to add in more Keanu Reeves as John Wick, a character who is already dead, and even retitled to “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina” to really drive home the point. Later this year, we’ll see if “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” will land with audiences who love magic and the Four Horsemen (which is what the team of magicians in the “Now You See Me” universe are called.)
If you’re looking for something that isn’t tied to an overall franchise, this weekend at the Modern, we are showing the new indie film “Bad Shabbos,” which won the audience award for narrative feature at Tribeca last year. It’s a dark comedy giving a bit of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” with a murder mystery as well. The trailer is below.
Also on Saturday, we are screening “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the classic hybrid animation/live action film from Disney and Robert Zemeckis. The director was always toying with special effects, but most of his recent films have an an unnerving, uncanny look to them. Recently he made “Here” with a heavily de-aged Tom Hanks and before that it was a live-action remake of Disney’s “Pinocchio” also starring Tom Hanks and a hyper-realistic CGI puppet of the titular character. Maybe its the hand-drawn animation or the guiding hand of producer Steven Spielberg, but the cartoon world in “Roger Rabbit” is much easier to take in than Zemeckis’s modern sensibilities. The show is free for members and kids this Saturday at noon at The Modern.
-Elijah
Beautiful film selections!
Also, well said.