Eye On the Clock, the Ground, the Sky

Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005)
directed by George Clooney
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

As most of you know, I spend an embarrassing amount of time reading celebrity gossip, and one of my constants in the world of movie stars - my rock, if you will - is George Clooney's abiding love for cocktail waitresses. They're pretty, not always particularly bright, but inevitably, one assumes, fun. Good Night, and Good Luck is as light on its feet as its director at a bar, reasonable when it could be didactic, and a class act all the way. Watching it again, and impressed as ever with the tempo, edits, and fades, I paid more attention to Ray Wise's Don Hollenbeck. What I first took to be a tribute to the very personal price men paid under McCarthyism, I now suspect is something of a gibe at the Keith Olbermanns of the world: echo chambers don't bring down men like McCarthy; reporters do. *

* Maybe that's anachronistic, since Olbermann, so far as I can tell, ripped his whole pathetic shtick from Good Night, and Good Luck. But that's like blaming Jaws for your least favorite summer blockbuster.