Good Night, Good Luck, Good Gods (BSG spoilers below)

After a couple weeks of staring at a laptop screen until I nearly weep in frustration, I'm going to try to bypass my writer's block by writing another scene. Rayelle's going to have to be stuck for a while longer until she gets clever enough to come to me and tell me how she gets out her current jam, which resembles something out of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" in terms of orchestration and believability. I mean, I am writing fiction, but fiction has its own rules and gravity that the audience accepts to a certain degree to start with. There's a contract there, and you best not make someone superhuman unless s/he has an S on the chest from the start. Rayelle's been through a lot to get to this point, and I'm not sure this scene she's mired in isn't real enough. I want it to be hellish and foreshadowing, but she just got out of a tight scrape a few pages back. I'm wondering if it's too much.

When I wasn't squinting in horror at my laptop, I was parked in front of a larger screen in another room. George Clooney's "Good Night and Good Luck" comes out tomorrow and I got an advance screener of his lauded, but Oscar-ignored feature about press freedom, government bullying, and the advent of television a medium for justice or tyrant, depending on who is holding the reins.

It's a low-scale affair, this film, shot in a crisp black and white, with a feel that it was shot for television, fitting since it's a piece of TV history. The music, which is done by Dianne Reeves, who serves as a velvet-voiced Greek chorus, is worthy of a listen on its own. "GNAGL" is one of those document films, a slice of Americana when we held an institution in better regard, and this time it's journalism standing up to one senator's vision of loyalty and "patriotism." It's a vital film not just because it document how far the American press has fallen, but that it shows that the truth is the only thing that can cut through paranoia, and how one man (and his team) risked their bond with the public to expose domestic tyranny in the face of a foreign threat (in the film, Communism is the boogeyman).

The best way to approach "GNAGL" is to not think of it as a movie in the terms of sweeping emotion or massive explosions, but as a piece of jazz inside a beehive. The queen bee among the CBS news team of the early 1950s, when TVs were beginning their steady march into American homes, was Edward Murrow, a veteran newscaster who cut his chops in radio before graduating to the talking head furniture set where he began helming "See It Now," a weekly precursor of the news affairs show "Nightline," in 1951. Murrow also started the weekly celebrity softball interview show, "Person to Person," and both shows are illustrated in the film, a desk being replaced with a comfortable chair, and Murrow looking uneasy asking Liberace when he's going to settle down with that right girl.

It's jazz in that Murrow (played with a hypnotizing reserve by David Strathairn, who lost Best Actor honors to Phillip Seymour Hoffman) barely says anything when on screen. You can tell he's thinking by the way his eyes dart among his colleagues who brainstorm around him and in the taut way he smokes one of an endless chain of cigarettes. He's waiting for something, holding back and thinking of what he'll say on camera, and when Murrow goes on air, it's with a clipped precision of a surgeon, a man who makes every word count. He is a soloist when the camera captures him, and he betrays no fear when taking on the biggest bully of the day (Sen. Joe McCarthy, playing himself from archive footage) and the network itself in the form his boss, William Paley (played with a stony dominance by Frank Langella). And when the mike and camera both go cold, Murrow recoils into silence, smoking again, being the quiet one in the bar as he and his CBS co-workers await the morning papers. It's strange. In other films, a passive, quiet, enigmatic performance would throw me off, anger me for not knowing more about the character, but Strathairn plays it quietly, showing in crisp pieces what Murrow values through his words and a seemingly force of will. It is in the final scene, when he lectures his co-workers about where television stands as it is about to enter the 1960s. It's a warning, but it's also a plea to understand the greatness televison can aspire to. To me, it sounded like the "Vast Wasteland" speech Newton Minnow would give three years later. Watching Strathairn as Murrow is a revelation, and not because the story of one man taking on McCarthy, but the amazement how people on TV talked back then. Watching "GNAGL," there's a pang that goes through the soul to see how far we've gone, from Murrow's eloquence to cable news screamfests. It makes sense in the pathology. Murrow came from radio, where words, not looks, mattered. Now, you have niche programming that has to scare you to bring you back, or outrage you so you channel the screaming newscaster as your champion. Murrow did neither. He told the truth. That, as the man says, is a radical act these days.

And finally a brief word about last Friday's "Battlestar Galactica," which can be paraphrased from Murrow: "Good luck" to Ron Moore, the show's majordomo, who took two years worth of stellar drama and action and dared to hit the reset button on the whole damn pot o' stew. The last 20 minutes of the 90-minute season finale hit me like a fever dream where I was unable to make out the edges as I stumbled along in new surroundings. The fleet is gone, New Caprica is overrun with Cylons, a fourth of the fleet nuked in one hell of a camera-rattling (nice touch) explosion, Baltar has served up humanity's demise to the Cylons twice in almost two years (must be a record). Like my wife says, I'm not sure about the changes. Too much all at once, and Ron Moore and Co. have their work cut out for them to come up with a damn good resolution by October. If they pull it off, BSG is going to be one of the best shows ever made. If they don't, the show is going to collapse harder than the Mulder-free "X-Files."

So for now, BSG takes a bow and the Sci-Fi channel is running the new "Dr. Who," which, like BSG, reset itself and won critical and audience acclaim. Glad to see the new "Who" is getting to American eyes at long last.

Tomorrow night, "V for Vendetta."