Word: newsreels
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...times, Hope and Glory tries to be an artsy film, but Boorman should have skipped the ridiculously Freudian dream sequences as well as the numerous subplots which end up being trite. Nor does Boorman's use of newsreel clips and radio speeches give any flavor of the era, partly because the director generally shows us what we've seen before in other movies...
...trust memories? And why should a memory film -- this one, say -- be any more reliable than a dream newsreel? Flipping through the family album of his imagination, an indulgent author wants to forgive and embrace everyone. So he airbrushes the warts and sets any bedroom closet skeletons to dancing merrily. After all, the kids will be watching. He may also find that his fondness for vignettes ("Remember when Aunt Bea got squiffed and vamped the delivery boy?") undercuts the dramatic imperative to hold the anonymous viewer's attention. Private lives don't always play in public. Grandpa's % ripping yarn...
There will be fewer "everybodys," though. As many as 35 of the division's 250 producers have been let go. The Morning News, a producer predicted, will become more like a newsreel, drawing many of its stories from overseas and affiliate bureaus, and will lose at least 20 of its 75 staffers. Stringer, hailed as the savior of CBS News when he took the job last September, wriggles in his role as the terminator. "Right now we're not thinking much about the outcome of the war," he says. "We're mostly thinking of the casualties...
Later, at the indoctrination center, Offred sees her mother again, this time in a newsreel approvingly shown by the authorities: "She's in a group of other women, dressed in the same fashion; she's holding a stick, no, it's part of a banner, the handle. The camera pans up and we see the writing, in paint, on what must have been a bed sheet: TAKE BACK THE NIGHT." Now there are no sleazy districts in Gilead. A woman can walk in public without being whistled at or worse. Offred wonders what her mother, if still alive, thinks about...
...plot--all-American guy shoots the mayor of San Francisco and a gay-activist supervisor, then goes to trial pleading that junk food made him do it--was as farfetched and compelling as that of any paranoiac political thriller. Herewith, reports on three more documentaries that transcend the newsreel...