On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

I finally got to see this movie. By signing up for LinkedIn Learning through my local public library's web services. I'm a little annoyed at myself for putting off that choice for however many years it's ended up being.

Are we ever going to be able to tell our own journalism success stories in movie form in Canada?

I'm betting that Canadian libel/slander case law will still say "NO".

Asking because I remember getting my time and money's worth from Spotlight and Good Night, and Good Luck, and I expect similar satisfaction from The Post in a week or two.

Now this is a disturbing development found whilst rummaging through techdirt.com tonight.

Snowden, Poitras & Others Sued For 'Billions Of Dollars' Spent By US Government In Response To Leaks
from the not-a-ton-of-crazy-in-the-filing,-but-not-a-ton-of-right,-either dept

Horace B. Edwards, Navy veteran and former Secretary of Transportation for the state of Kansas, is suing Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and a handful of "Hollywood Defendants" for profiteering from the distribution of "stolen documents." This is supposedly being done on "behalf of the American people" ("John and Jane Does 1-10" listed in the "Plaintiffs" field).

What Edwards is seeking is a court-ordered "constructive trust," financed by the proceeds of Laura Poitras' Snowden documentary "CitizenFour," to offset the financial damage caused by the leaked documents.

More in the techdirt.com article at the other end of the link...so go have a look. Has Mr. Edwards maybe reached a bit too far here? I'm not a lawyer, although I do have an interest in how law works.

I went and saw that movie tonight. You can thank this interview of Laura Poitras by Piya Chattopadhyay on Q from a little while ago in part for that decision.

I was laughing as I left the cinema. It wasn't a pleasant laugh. Because I cannot doubt what I saw and heard.

Still...it was worth the time and money. And I paid cash for the ticket.

Oh, for further amusement value? The theatre where I saw it is right across the street from what I sometimes call "Spy City, Canada". It's the only movie theatre in town that'll show it. So far, anyway.

Frankly, I was surprised that Cineplex picked up that gauntlet. At all. I'd figured the Bytowne would have this one locked up, it would last two or three days there, and then we'd all be waiting for the DVD or iTunes or whatever's next...

I saw that particular documentary at the Bytowne today after attending to research and job-hunt chores earlier in the day. If you're at all familiar with the history of the hunt for the Higgs particle, you'll already know what the movie is partly about. The rest of it is about a half-dozen members of the research community that gathered around the project at CERN from 2007 to 2012.

I know this was a Big Damn Deal. It was big enough for Anna Maria Tremonti to devote air time on The Current to it on a couple of occasions, in addition to whatever Bob McDonald was doing for Quirks and Quarks.

So the movie gave me a bit of additional context and human dimension to the whole thing, which I deeply appreciate. It does leave me with a bit of a quandary, and it may take some of you with more physics knowledge than I've got on me at the moment to work through: the discovery of the Higgs seems to have left a couple of the researchers with a bit of a quandary as to what the fact of its existence and the details of it further add up to. Mainly, this "supersymmetry vs. multiverse" argument.

I'm unsure as to why it's necessary for one of these concepts to win out over the other.

Possibly, it's because I've read too many comic books where multiverses were part of the standing menu of the super-hero genre. In fact, you could call that diagnosis of my thinking a certainty. Add in the influence of Mark Gruenwald's work on the Marvel Universe Handbook, particularly his devotion to making the pseudo-science of Marvel fit - however roughly - with the known science of the day, and you can guess the rest of it.

But if anyone is willing to try to answer that "why does one concept have to win" thing...?

...Michael Moore's Sicko.

Granted that it may be on its way to being less a complaint about how things are and more a comment-snapshot of a specific timeframe in US health-care history...or so a lot of us hope...but that transition in progress is part of the reason why I want to see it now.

Alas, I can't. Yet. The copy I borrowed from the local library branch is messed up from many, many repeat viewings by library patrons before me. Something as yet undetermined will have to be done to solve this.

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.