On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

...in Ottawa-Gatineau and tonight we're expecting 5-10 centimetres' worth of snowy reminders of the fact. This is despite the fact that current conditions include "mist" at the airport according to Environment Canada.

Workshop went okay last night. On my way from the Rideau Library to Rideau Station to get home afterwards, though, I got a clue from Bytowne Cinema about a movie I've been hoping to see: Dark Waters, that docu-drama about lawyer Rob Bilott's fight over "forever" chemical pollution by Dupont in West Virginia. Mark Ruffalo is playing Bilott in this movie, which is another of Participant Media's co-productions. They've got one more showing in Ottawa at the Bytowne scheduled, and that's for 345 PM today. So I've got that in addition to job-search stuff today.

This afternoon, on Ontario Today, that CBC Radio phone-in show was discussing the movies of last year, and which ones mattered to us most.

Okay, here's my list:

• Black Panther
• Molly's Game (Yes, it premiered the prior year, but since I rewatched it at a cinema...)
• The Death of Stalin
• The Post
• Avengers: Infinity War
• Ant-Man and the Wasp (I still say it should be The Wasp and the Ant-Man.)
• Shock and Awe
• Solo: a Star Wars Story
• First Man
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

A grand total of ten. I slipped a little this past year, and I blame both chores and finances.And I'm thinking that there's one I forgot to mention...

(Since revised to include The Death of Stalin. Which I should not have forgotten.)

Went and saw Shock and Awe at Imagine Cinema St. Laurent this afternoon. Harrelson, Jovovich, Marsden, Reiner (both sides of the camera), Biel, Schiff...a docudrama covering the Knight-Ridder reporters who covered the run-up to the Third Persian Gulf War and the Bush II administration's efforts to gin up the rationale for it.

I should have been paying at least twice the ticket price for seeing this movie.

While I'm expecting to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows later this week, and hope to get around to the new adaptation of three of the Tintin graphic novels sometime early next month, it seems a good idea to remember a movie I saw five years back that was worth the money spent at the Bytowne, worth the money spent at the retailer selling the DVD, and worth some more time now, namely Good Night and Good Luck.

Produced by a team led by the likes of George Clooney - who worked on both sides of the camera to get it done - this film retold a tale many of us around the anglophone portion of the world know to varying degrees: the battle between United States Senator Joseph McCarthy and longtime CBS reporter and later news anchor/producer Edward R. Murrow, itself fought on both sides of the news cameras of the day.

In rummaging around the Net tonight, I stumbled across a blog entry at the Columbia Journalism Review website by one Michael Meyer looking back at Good Night and Good Luck five years after its initial release. It seems worth sharing, as a counterweight against my own instinct toward escapism. Escapism has its usages as a mental health preservative, carefully managed, but a well-done docu-drama is worth as much for its own virtues.

Looking back at what I wrote when I first saw it...those of you who responded to my review had points that also needed making as much as anything said by the movie itself. Thank you for answering my thoughts with your own.