[ThisWeek] Sight Unseen; Good Night, and Good Luck at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

Continuing this week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

Sirius Idaho Theatre presents

Sight Unseen
by Donald Margulies

Thursday, February 9 at 7:30 PM
Friday, February10 at 7:30 PM
Saturday, February 11 at 2:00 PM
Saturday, February 11 at 7:30 PM

Tickets available at BookPeople of Moscow (521 S. Main St.)
$15 Adults, $10 Seniors, $5 Students
Tickets also available an hour before each performance at the Kenworthy
Performing Arts Centre box office.
If you would like to purchase tickets and have them sent to you, email or
call John Dickinson (johnd at moscow.com, 208-301-4361).

CAST

Jonathan - Donal Wilkinson
Nick - Peter Aylward
Patricia - Sally Eames-Harlan
Grete - Anna Cottle

Directed by Pam Palmer

Sight Unseen is the story of an American mega-artist so successful he's had
the obligatory profile in Vanity Fair and can claim astronomical prices for
his works sight unseen from a waiting list of wealthy patrons. In England
for a retrospective of his paintings, the artist goes into the countryside
to visit his original muse and lover, the "sacrificial shiksa" whom he
abandoned in his quest for the opulent life which now devours him. Donald
Margulies won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and Sight Unseen won the Obie Award
for best new American Play in 1992.

"Šyou can tell when a play has gripped its audience, for no one seems to
breathe, let alone shift in his seat. This phenomenon can be observedŠat
Sight Unseen...." ‹NY Times.

Sign up to usher for a performance and see the play for free....
Call or email Pam Palmer, Managing Artistic Director, at 208-596-2270
<siriusidahotheatre at gmail.com

Sight Unseen contains language that may offend some audience members.
* * *

Good Night, and Good Luck (PG)
Sunday, February 12
4:30 & 7:00 PM
$5/adult, $2/children 12 and younger
KFS passes accepted for Sunday showings
(see Review below)
* * *

Next week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre-

Pride & Prejudice (PG)
February 17 at 7:00 PM
February 18 & 19 at 4:00 & 7:00 PM
* * *

Also in February-

Walk the Line (PG-13)
February 24 at 7:00 PM
February 25 & 26 at 4:00 & 7:00 PM
 
International Jazz Collections
2006 Lecture Series
Mark Cantor
Celluloid Improvisations:
Black, White, and Technicolor
February 25 at 12:30 PM
Free

Coming in March: Auditorium Chamber Music Series presents Masters of Persian
Music; Capote; U of I Women¹s Center Lunafest; U of I American Indian Film
Festival; Grangeville Bluegrass Company

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre presents Grangeville Bluegrass Company and
Prairie Flyer in an evening of bluegrass music on Friday, March 24, 2006 at
7:00 PM.  Tickets will go on sale March 1 for $12/ general admission and
$8/child under 13 years.

Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $2/children 12 and younger
KFS passes accepted year-round for Sunday movies!

For more information, go to www.kenworthy.org or call 208-882-4127.
* * *
This week¹s movie review-

Good Night, and Good Luck

Academy Award Nominations for ³Good Night, and Good Luck²

Best Picture
Best Director: George Clooney
Best Actor: David Strathairn
Best Original Screenplay: George Clooney and Grant Heslov
Best Art Direction
Best Cinematography

Directed by George Clooney; written by Mr. Clooney and Grant Heslov
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
This film is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Apart from a little
rough language, it is as clean as the television broadcasts it describes.


As reviewed by A. O. Scott writing for the New York Times

Shot in a black-and-white palette of cigarette smoke, hair tonic, dark suits
and pale button-down shirts, "Good Night, and Good Luck" plunges into a
half-forgotten world in which television was new and the cold war was at its
peak. Though it is a meticulously detailed reconstruction of an era, the
film, directed by George Clooney from a script he wrote with Grant Heslov,
is concerned with more than nostalgia.

Burnishing the legend of Edward R. Murrow, the CBS newsman who in the 1940's
and 50's established a standard of journalistic integrity his profession has
scrambled to live up to ever since, "Good Night, and Good Luck" is a
passionate, thoughtful essay on power, truth-telling and responsibility.

And be prepared to pay attention. "Good Night, and Good Luck" is not the
kind of historical picture that dumbs down its material, or walks you
carefully through events that may be unfamiliar. Instead, it unfolds,
cinéma-vérité style, in the fast, sometimes frantic present tense, following
Murrow and his colleagues as they deal with the petty annoyances and larger
anxieties of news gathering at a moment of political turmoil. The story
flashes back from a famous, cautionary speech that Murrow gave at an
industry convention in 1958 to one of the most notable episodes in his
career - his war of words and images with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

While David Strathairn plays Murrow with sly eloquence and dark wit, Mr.
Clooney allows the junior Senator from Wisconsin to play himself (thanks to
surviving video clips of his hearings and public appearances), a jolt of
documentary truth that highlights some of the movie's themes. Television, it
suggests, can be both a potent vehicle for demagoguery and a weapon in the
fight against it.

Mr. Clooney, who plays Murrow's producer and partner, Fred Friendly, has
clearly thought long and hard about the peculiar, ambiguous nature of the
medium. It is a subject that comes naturally to him: his father, Nick, was
for many years a local television newscaster in Cincinnati, and the younger
Mr. Clooney's own star first rose on the small screen.

"Good Night, and Good Luck" brilliantly recreates the milieu of early
television. (Robert Elswit's smoky cinematography and Stephen Mirrione's
suave, snappy editing are crucial to this accomplishment.) It also captures,
better than any recent movie I can think of, the weirdly hermetic atmosphere
of a news organization at a time of crisis.

When Murrow, in March 1954, prepares to broadcast his exposé of McCarthy's
methods, the suspense is excruciating, even if we know the outcome. Because
we do, it is possible to view "Good Night, and Good Luck" simply as a
reassuring story of triumph. But the film does more than ask us, once again,
to admire Edward R. Murrow and revile Joseph R. McCarthy. That layer of the
story is, as it should be, in stark black-and-white, but there is a lot of
gray as well, and quite a few questions that are not so easily resolved. The
free press may be the oxygen of a democratic society, but it is always
clouded by particles and pollutants, from the vanity or cowardice of
individual journalists to the impersonal pressures of state power and the
profit motive.

Mr. Clooney does not simplify. The scenes between Murrow and Paley, taking
place in the latter's cryptlike office, have an almost Shakespearean
gravity, and not only because Mr. Strathairn and Mr. Langella perform their
roles with such easy authority. McCarthy may serve as the hissable villain,
but Paley is a more complicated foil for Murrow - at once patron,
antagonist, and protector.

Most of the discussion of this movie will turn on its content - on the
history it investigates and on its present-day resonance. This is a
testament to Mr. Clooney's modesty, but also to his skill. He has found a
cogent subject, an urgent set of ideas and a formally inventive, absolutely
convincing way to make them live on screen.


As reviewed by Mick LaSalle writing for the San Francisco Chronicle

"Good Night, and Good Luck" dramatizes a key moment in the history of
television news, the standoff between newsman Edward R. Murrow and
red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

In the course of three broadcasts in 1954, one of which McCarthy had all to
himself, Murrow went up against one of the most powerful and feared men in
the country and, by assembling facts and using the senator's own statements
against him, more or less took him down. Those three episodes of "See It
Now" marked the beginning of the end of McCarthy's influence in America.

Yet in the midst of what is widely considered an exalted period in TV news
history, undermining changes were taking place on the network level. The
movie dramatizes that, too -- the beginnings of news as a money-making
enterprise, as a ratings grabber, as a form of entertainment. Part drama and
part civics lesson, "Good Night, and Good Luck" is an entertaining slice of
American political and cultural history, enhanced by faithful period detail
and energized by urgent parallels that George Clooney, as director and
co-writer, wants to stress about the present day.

Shot in a high-contrast black and white, it opens at a banquet in 1958, at
which Murrow is about to be honored. As the camera floats in and out of the
crowd, take a moment to look at the faces: The actors are wearing 1950s
clothing and hairstyles, and yet something in the actors' essences retain
the telltale suggestion of 2005. The changes in consciousness from one era
to another are subtle yet unmistakable.

At this 1958 banquet, Murrow is supposed to take his award and say something
nice, but instead he uses the platform to criticize TV news for becoming a
form of empty escapism. As with all of Murrow's public pronouncements in
"Good Night, and Good Luck," the text is taken from Murrow's own words, and
those words apply even more to today than yesterday.

>From there, we go back another five years, to the era of McCarthyism,
character assassination and loyalty oaths. Murrow is cautioned to be
balanced in his coverage, to which he replies, "I can't accept the idea that
every issue has two equally reasonable sides to it." It's an important
point: When one side is lying and the other is telling the truth, it does
the truth a disservice to present both positions as equally valid.

Clooney lovingly re-creates the world of '50s television: The jolly
cigarette commercials, the ancient technology and the primitive ways of
doing things. For example, during the broadcasts, producer Fred Friendly
sits under Murrow's desk and taps his leg when the camera is on.

Clooney's point will not please everybody. Clooney is suggesting that the
fear McCarthy was trading in, the fear people have of getting blown up, is
pervasive today; that the spirit of McCarthy, an authoritarianism disguised
in patriotic language, lives on; and that TV news is no longer a match for
it. At a time when movies are straining to be innocuous, "Goodnight, and
Good Luck" is a bold entry, to say the least. About half the public will
also see it as patriotic.


As reviewed by Steve Persall writing for the St. Petersburg Times

Good Night, and Good Luck is filmed in gorgeous shades of black and white,
but conceived in only the starkest essence of those colors. There are good
people whom director and co-writer George Clooney wishes to honor, and
there's one bad guy hanged by his own words. Clooney does everything he can
to tighten the noose.

Wearing the white hats, so to speak, are the employees of CBS News who
challenged the divisive, bullying tactics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his
Cold War crusade against communist infiltration of the United States. That
McCarthy overstepped the bounds of decency and freedom isn't arguable; that
the Red threat he railed against had any substance isn't discussed. It's the
power of the press vs. the pressure of power, and only a hermit would fail
to recognize contemporary parallels.

Cloaking himself in the American flag, McCarthy pried into any private life
that hinted of leftist leanings. Refusal to submit was considered a
confession of guilt. Guilt was contagious: Any sympathetic person could be
branded a co-conspirator. Conspiracies were so vague that any opposition
could be viewed as part of a single, larger plot.

CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow was widely viewed as the most trusted person on
television, an infant medium that was capturing the mass imagination.
Turning that imagination into reasonable thought was Murrow's own crusade,
and opposing McCarthy's reckless tactics was his battlefield. Good Night,
and Good Luck - Murrow's signature signoff line - depicts their mano a mano
showdown for the nation's conscience, offering a lesson in where they
succeed and fail to modern politicians and reporters.

As a director, Clooney and cinematographer Robert Elswit revel in 1950s
period detail; fashions, mores, cigarette smoke clouds and primitive
technology. The film's compacted narrative keeps almost everything within
CBS walls, with the exception of Dianne Reeves' interludes as a jazz club
singer. Why? Because it's the sound of the era, not because she has anything
to do with Murrow and McCarthy. It might seem a mistake were it not so
expertly filmed.

The Cold War had Murrow, Vietnam had Walter Cronkite and now Iraq,
Afghanistan and wherever's next have Fox News Channel and Jon Stewart.
Something is wrong with this picture. ³Good Night, and Good Luck² is
Clooney's passionate, possibly vain attempt to make it right.

Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart
* * *
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
208-882-4127
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by
logging onto our website
http://www.kenworthy.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org
To speak with a KPAC staff member,
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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