Hi all

Interesting debate about Clooney's presence in the film. I was struck by how unobtrusive a role he played, using his presence on-screen to get people watching a film they might not otherwise see, yet keeping himself well out of the way.

To accord his recent involvement in 'political' films to a need to compensate for a fading heart-throb image seems direly cynical. He has lost many more fans by doing this than he has gained. I'm sure he's made a whole lot less money.

I thought the film stood admirably on its own terms, and enjoyed the way it kept personal stories and characters to a minimum in the interests of making the storyline and the political points clean and clear.

Pete

Sheila said:

My concern is not with wider policial issues but with the film as spectacle and product

and I agree this is precisely where the film falls down. I think GC would have been better off making a documentary on the subject - it would have been less preachy and put the footage into some sort of context.

Yes, it did that, all right. This is more of what I'd call a man's film.

Sheila

<Added>

This reply for Pete.

[q] think GC would have been better off making a documentary on the subject [/q]

Elspeth, I agree with this, and also about the need for context. On Sunday I was talking with someone who was old enough to be aware of the McCarthy trials in the fifties and he said that 'we were all aghast at what those Americans were allowing to happen.' This and the way his eyes blazed did supply some context for me, more so than when I saw footage as part of a media studies course in the 90s. Then, I found the whole thing very boring and resented the tutors having chosen it for a case study. Later, when I studied censorship of Chinese films for my own research purposes it began to make more sense.

I read a review that said this was one case where one wished the film had been a bit longer.

Sheila

<Added>

Whay is it I can't make the quote box work?

Sheila

I think we have done this one to death. But before we leave it I do want to argue that in almost every element of film production I would argue GNAGL is brilliant. Its script is lucid, incisive and powerfully affecting. The editing is precise and perfectly paced and cadenced with the action and the events it depicts. The cinematography creates an essential and suspenseful sense of claustrophobic intensity both of a live television studio and a team of people working on a common project of importance and conmsiderable risk to their careers and therefore private lives. McCarthy destroyed people and lives just as by the way Blair has done (ask Professor Kelly's family) - though I accept no one who has commented so far wants to take that critical parallel. The performances are in my view superbly judged for the context. Most of your criticisms of them seem to ignore the 1950's setting. People were grey, and certainly in terms of hair and dress etc almost indistinguishable. That the mores and attitudes of the time were also very different is graphically and very well pointed up for you by Clooney himself with the Kent advert. This puts a chill in the heart of today's audience knowing what they now do, and no one then did, about smoking - Murrow I believe smoked around 80 a day. I had friends who smoked more. They're all dead now. The conception of the film is very distinctive and marvelously effective. Although it has been done before, I find the complete absence of any form of musical soundtrack outside the punctuating, lyrically apposite and superbly atmospheric jazz songs, works better than I have ever seen in other films. This is a quintessentially writer's film - every word counts and is doing something. People directly involved in live broadcasting don't have a little chat about what they had for breakfast. Even a modicum of knowledge about the time, the circumstances, the paranoia into which McCarthy tapped so well and that a few years before Orson Welles so dramatically revealed, makes the biographical opening out you recommend totally inapappropriate for what the film is about and the seriousness of its intent. On its relevance to today I guess it depends where you stand on whether you accept parallels between the generalised paranoia that McCarthy exploited so effectively and the same disposition among especially Americans, to Mr Bush's war on terror.

Aesthetic judgement is necesarily subjective but I have to say comparing this film unfavourably, especially in terms of honesty, with Sinatra'a vanity projects, for once in my life leaves me totally speechless. (For which I am sure followers of this debate will now be eternally grateful). Your view that it is somehow a "man's" film has the same effect.

So that I promise is my very last word on GNAGL.

"Thank God for that" I hear.

Z

Yes, as I said, the music was in my opinion the best feature. I have spelled out my reasons for thinking it a man's film in my contribution to the discussion following your own review. I's have thought it would be obvious that a film whose setting and historical period allows it to more or less ignore women would find little sympathy with them. I can only speak for myself in this reagrd, and I'm discounting what I am told by some reviewers is the charismatic appeal of George Clooney.

Sheila