Good Night, and Good Luck

George Clooney’s the director here, and is a film set entirely in black and white. Wanted to watch this because I was in love with the title, and I have a bias towards Clooney’s appeance. Had no idea what it was about, but thought that it was about a radio show host.

Except I was wrong about that, and it’s actually about a television show host who’s countering a certain political figure. It’s about and based on a real person and real events, which I wasn’t aware of when I watched the movie.

Anyways, the movie itself conveys all of its meaning through dialogue, so it’s a very hearing-intensive movie. If you don’t pay attention and hang onto every word, you won’t understand what’s happening. I found this to be a refreshing change, but at first I had a lot of difficulty processing all the content, but as it went on, I got used to each character’s speaking style and could receive all their lines. The crazy thing is that even the DVD version doesn’t have subtitles, so you really have to turn the volume up, pay close attention, and listen.

The whole movie is really full of substance and intelligence. The main character, Murrow, a former radio host and now a TV show host, always spoke with very formal and meaningful words that were straightforward and held a great deal of significance. The things he said during his show sounds like something out of a written essay, and in that respect it was hard to process on the go, but it’s impressive how he can say all that with the right emphasis and not sound boring. However, his expression almost never changed, but when it did, you could feel that something was up since “He finally changed his expression!” or something. He also had a really intense gaze, which I found pretty captivating and interesting.

George Clooney was also acting in this, but he had way less spotlight time compared to the main character, who was the person the whole movie’s cast revolved around, basically. (The movie is about him after all)

All in all, a really substantial movie, but again, it’s kind of hard to catch everything while watching, and it might seem slow to some people since the whole movie is basically people talking and looking at each other! I love that it makes you think, though, and GJ to George Clooney for directing/co-writing on a historical subject that everyone should know more about. 80/100!