BEFORE: Was out last night at a screening of the Oscar-nominated animated shorts, which was one of those "marketing to the marketers" events I mentioned last week. This company called Shorts HD contacts the makers of the nominated films, plus the makers of a few also-rans, and licenses the films for a short theatrical run. For many people like me, this is the best way to see them - plus they show them on iTunes for people not like me. I don't usually get to see the Disney or Pixar shorts, because I don't go see the Disney or Pixar features in the theater, so this was my first time seeing "The Blue Umbrella" or "Get a Horse!". My favorite among the nominees was probably "Mr Hublot", a stop-motion film about a guy with OCD who takes in a stray dog. Since I'm quite OCD and I sometimes take in stray cats, it spoke to me. "Room on the Broom" was also cute, and had a good message, but was too repetitive in the end.
However, watching shorts doesn't get me anywhere closer to my goal, whatever that is, so when I came home from drinks at the bar after, I still had to watch a feature. Linking from "The Age of Innocence", Michelle Pfeiffer carries over again and completes a trifecta.
THE PLOT: An ambitious young woman, determined to build a career in TV journalism, gets good advice from her first boss, and they fall in love.
AFTER: I felt semi-sure I had seen this one, because my ex was very into Redford, in an ironic way it turns out, and made me watch most of his films. But this came out in 1996, the year we broke up, so I don't think we got around to this one. For a while there films about reporters were huge, like "Broadcast News" and "The Paper" (on the list) and even fluff like "Switching Channels". So this seems right in step with those, but with much less drama about the stories themselves.
This is more about the people working in the newsroom, and HOW they report the news, not what the news is. (Yeah, kinda, but not really.) I knew this was semi-based on the life of Jessica Savitch, who became a reporter back in the 1970's - only this moves her representative character firmly into the 1990's. However, if you read up on the details of her life and relationship, you can see just how much Hollywood likes to shy away from the harsh realities of existence, smoothing away all troubles and sugar-coating whatever remains.
This is another proponent of the "Fake it 'till you make it" philosophy, stating that it's OK if you lie about your credentials and experience, providing that doing so gets you into the job you were supposedly born to do. Whatever happened to starting at the bottom and paying your dues?
Of course, Hollywood tells us once again that it helps to be a pretty girl - so who needs experience? We should just hand everything over to the pretty people, whatever they want, right? And if that takes too long, they should just sleep with their mentor/boss, because that's perfectly acceptable. Give me a break - oh, wait, they love each other and fix each other's damaged psyches, so that's OK then.
The film is full of these little reporting "hints", shorthand phrases like "If it bleeds, it leads" or "We are only as good as the stories we tell" - but this in no way should be taken as a substitute for actual information about reporting. Why is "Tally" a better news name than "Sally"? Is it really that easy to report the weather? Can you really survive a prison riot just by keeping your back to the wall? So many questions, and so few answers...
Also starring Robert Redford (last seen in "The Candidate"), Stockard Channing (last seen in "Six Degrees of Separation"), Joe Mantegna (last seen in "Searching for Bobby Fischer'), Miguel Sandoval, James Rebhorn (last seen in "Guarding Tess"), Scott Bryce, Kate Nelligan, DeDee Pfeiffer.
RATING: 5 out of 10 cameramen
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