Thursday Movie Picks - Journalists/Reporters for Print/TV

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and telling us about them!

Is it really Thursday again already? It feels like just yesterday that we were talking about movies on trains. And this week, the theme is journalists/reporters. Ah, the intrepid reporter bungling their way to a career-making story with nothing but pluck, gumption, and a notepad - one of my favorite movie plots! I could have gone classic this week (if you haven't seen His Girl Friday, DO IT. Rosalind Russell is tremendous in it), but I did that last week, so contemporary films were in order. Here we have, for your viewing enjoyment, two fictional journalists who got more than what they bargained for, and one real-life newsman who was much more than his opponents bargained for.

Never Been Kissed (Raja Gosnell, 1999) Josie Geller, played by a radiant Drew Barrymore, starts out as a copy editor, but then one day the Editor-in-Chief of the paper she works for gives her a "real" assignment: go undercover in a high school to report on what teenagers' lives are really like. Of course, Josie had a terrible time when she was in high school (she was nicknamed "Josie Grossy") and wants to succeed this time around. Except that she still has the same temperament she had in high school, and teens haven't changed that much in the intervening years. So then her popular younger brother (David Arquette) goes back to school too, and everyone learns that high school - even one attended by 30 year-olds - is hell, and outer appearances don't always match the inner person. It's all cliché, yes, but Barrymore is impossibly winning, and the ensemble cast (including Michael Vartan, Jessica Alba, Leelee Sobieski, Molly Shannon, John C. Reilly, James Franco, and Garry Marshall in a great cameo as the Editor-in-Chief) is very fun.

The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002) Intrepid journalist Rachel Keller is concerned about her son, who has apparently been drawing morbid pictures of his cousin Katie's death.... even before it happened. Being an intrepid journalist, she naturally decides to investigate the mysterious death of her niece. Which of course includes watching this weird-ass videotape she watched in a cabin with friends. A videotape straight out of urban legend. One that causes you to die seven days after you watch it. But Rachel finds out that the legend is all too real. And of course she bumbles her way around trying to get to the bottom of how such a tape came into existence. Both The Ring and the original Japanese film Ringu, on which it is based, have a concept that has horror built right in; the plot itself suggests that the very act of watching the film will kill you. It doesn't get much scarier than that. But Verbinski's film has a sturdier sense of mood than Hideo Nakata's original, and a great performance from Naomi Watts at its center.

Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005) Nightly News anchorman Edward R. Murrow and his team go to battle with Senator Joseph McCarthy, who is on a Communist witch hunt in 1950s America. Clooney's film so ably and completely captures not just the look but the feel of the 50s in every aspect of the production. And while the entire ensemble cast deserves praise, it's character actor David Strathairn, as Murrow, who has the biggest part, and boy does he run with the opportunity, giving a performance that transcends mere mimicry to stand on its own as a performance of solid, deep power. Clooney (whose passion project this was; his father was a TV newsman) couldn't have asked for a better actor to carry this exciting, well-made, important film.