I went and watched Good Night, and Good Luck. today with Ryan, Libby and Lesley.

What a great film! It's about Ed Murrow who was a News Reporter with CBS in the 1950s. He did a series of reports on Sentator McCarthy during the height of his communist witch hunt. I first read about him in February while sitting in a park in Croydon reading my book Tell Me Know Lies. I thought he was pretty cool then. The McCarthy witch hunts have always interested me, ever since studying The Crucible in school. So it was fun to see McCarthy and Ed Murrow (or at least an Ed Murrow actor) do their thing.

The film is a very pointed critique of the erosion of civil liberties which is currently going on in the US. I thought it was interesting that The Crucible was written about the Salam Trials as an allegory of what was going on in the McCarthy era. Now the McCarthy trials are being used to take a shot at what's happening now. I hope they make a film about what's happening now in the future to have a go at their contemporary issues. Although if we have to wait 300 hundred years (as was the space between The Salam Witch Trials and The Crucible) I may sadly miss the film.

But all that said, it was good, well written, well acted and smart. The film reminded me a bit of Fail Safe but that may have just been because it was shot in black and white and had George Clooney in it.

So in light of the past few days film watching I will have to revise my Top 10 of 2005:

1. Million Dollar Baby
2. Cinderella Man
3. Batman Begins
4. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
5. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
6. Ray
7. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
8. Good Night, and Good Luck.
9. Downfall
10. The Aviator