The Paper

Year 6, Day 244 - 9/1/14 - Movie #1,835

BEFORE: Michael Keaton carries over from "Pacific Heights" - it's hard to find a good Labor Day film without resorting to "Norma Rae" or "North Country".  Besides, those films aren't even on my list.  But let's try a film about the hard-working (?) staff of a daily newspaper, since that's a job that requires people to work every day, even on holidays.  

THE PLOT:  Henry Hackett is the editor of a New York City tabloid. He is a workaholic who loves his job, but the long hours and low pay are leading to discontent, and a hot story soon confronts Henry with tough decisions.

AFTER: OK, good choice for Labor Day, and not just because the main character's wife is pregnant.  This is really about how people choose to balance work with their personal lives, or in some cases how they fail to do so.  Henry's the metro editor and always pulling late nights and coming home at 4 am, after putting the late edition to bed, plus he has trouble making it to dinners and family functions. His pregnant wife was formerly a reporter herself, so she's feeling left out and wondering if giving birth means the end of her career.  

The publisher of the New York Sun is an older man who put work ahead of family for most of his career, and now he's had four failed marriages and trying to reconnect with his adult daughter.  So you can see where a lifetime of putting work first might lead.  And the managing editor is having an affair with a reporter, while also deciding whether she needs to quit the newspaper to end the affair, or get a raise to pay for all the afternoon hotel bills.  Meanwhile, an investigative reporter who broke the story about a traffic commissioner who disobeys parking signs, feels he's being harassed by city tow-trucks in response.  So, really, nobody's doing a very good job of reconciling their work lives and personal lives.

This may feels like it rings true, but here also leads to too many subplots.

Into the madness of this daily grind drops a story about two white businessmen murdered in Brooklyn, and two black teens arrested, perhaps wrongly, for the crime.  Even though this film is now 20 years old, this topic feels quite timely given recent events - but you know this is a Hollywood film because the teens were arrested by white cops without the use of deadly force or even chokeholds.   Since this film covers just one 24-hour period, much of the drama revolves around whether the paper chooses to go with a "guilty" or "innocent" headline.  Unfortunately, this feels like an over-simplification, because most complicated major news stories probably aren't resolved within a particular timeline, or could possibly be quantified with just one headline or story.

And it's a big cliché to have someone say "Stop the presses!".  A writer can try to hide this by having his characters point out that it's a big cliché when they do it, but this doesn't change the fact that it's still a cliché.  It's been way overdone.  

This film will also make you wonder how people managed to get things done back in the days before everything was digital.  At this time in history, people were still using cameras with film, for example, which meant that they had to rush back to their darkroom and develop film in chemicals before they knew if they got the shot they needed.  

NITPICK POINT: Cell phones are not really seen in this film either, so reporters had to go to a police precinct, write something down on a notepad, then travel back to the paper to tell their editor in person what's on that notepad.  Funny, I thought we at least had payphones in 1994, but I guess I'm wrong about that.  Nope, I guess you had to take the subway all the way back to the newspaper to give someone that valuable information on paper, because I guess there weren't faxes or e-mails either.

A lot's been said over the past few years about the death of print journalism - but newspapers and magazines are still being published every day.  Sure, most news also appears on the web, and most newspapers and magazines put out digital editions as well as tree-based ones, but I don't see the physical objects going away any time soon.  I can still read a paper magazine on the subway or some place where I don't have a wi-fi connection, so there's the convenience factor.  I still buy the Sunday paper because I like doing the crossword on paper, and also circling the shows I want to record in the TV insert.  Call me old-fashioned, but I'm leaving it for the next generation to go all-digital if they want.

They still publish paper comic-books, though I don't know for how much longer.  Somehow collecting digital files doesn't feel the same.  And digital files will never, ever go up in value, so what's the point of collecting them?  Kids today don't understand we had to WALK (or ride a bike) to the comic book store every Wednesday, buy our entertainment in PERSON from an occasionally sketchy employee, then WALK back home, and now we were saddled with more paper that, once enjoyed, now had to be taken care of - bagged, boxed, stored and kept from danger for the rest of our natural lives.  That's an awesome responsibility that I fear future generations will fail to appreciate. 

I don't think "video killed the radio star", because we've still got radio.  Sure, the independent stations have gone under or all been bought up by large media corporations, but people still listen to the radio, right?  And iTunes and Pandora and Spotify didn't kill radio either.  Cable companies broadcast a bunch of music channels too, plus there's satellite radio and still you can turn on your AM/FM and find a good song in the genre you want.  In much the same way, I don't see that the internet has killed good old tabloid journalism - it's still there if you want to get your fingers covered in newsprint. 

Also starring Glenn Close (last seen in "Reversal of Fortune"), Marisa Tomei (last seen in "Happy Accidents"), Robert Duvall (last seen in "Open Range"), Randy Quaid (last seen in "The Missouri Breaks"), Jason Alexander (last seen in "Brighton Beach Memoirs"), Spalding Gray (last seen in "The Killing Fields"), Geoffrey Owens, Lynne Thigpen, Amelia Campbell, Bruce Altman, Jack McGee, Edward Hibbert, Siobhan Fallon, with cameos from Jason Robards (last seen in "Julia"), Catherine O'Hara (last seen in "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events"), Jill Hennessy, Bob Costas, Graydon Carter, Kurt Loder.

RATING: 5 out of 10 soda breaks