Not much ‘Glory’ in morning talk show movie
In
”
Morning Glory,
”
out on DVD this week, Harrison Ford plays a washed-up TV
journalist who is forced to finish out his contract with a network
by anchoring a failing morning show. For once, he shows his age on
screen and the choice of the movie seems like a step in the
washed-up direction for his own career.
The real focus of the movie is Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams.)
She is a young, chipper television producer who is at the beginning
stretch of her career.
Not much ‘Glory’ in morning talk show movie
In “Morning Glory,” out on DVD this week, Harrison Ford plays a washed-up TV journalist who is forced to finish out his contract with a network by anchoring a failing morning show. For once, he shows his age on screen and the choice of the movie seems like a step in the washed-up direction for his own career.
The real focus of the movie is Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams.) She is a young, chipper television producer who is at the beginning stretch of her career.
But after putting in endless hours at a morning show – making herself available at all hours of the day and night, sacrificing any semblance of a personal life – she gets fired from her job.
She wants to stay in the news industry, preferably in television, so what follows is a montage of job interviews in which she mostly gets laughed out of the offices of potential employers. The business is contracting and there aren’t many jobs out there – and the few that are available require more or less experience than she has.
Finally, Becky is offered a job at a local morning show for little pay. The station manager Jerry (Jeff Goldblum) gives her the job with the warning that ratings are failing and she has just a little time to turn things around before the network pulls the plug on the show entirely.
Becky has some challenges from the start. She has two anchors who can’t stand each other. Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton) is an aging anchor and a bit of a diva. She will do just about anything for ratings. Paul McVee (Ty Burrell) thinks he is God’s gift to women and he refuses to attend budget meetings – the meeting where the staff discusses the stories for the day.
To establish her authority early on with her news crew, Becky fires Paul. But now she is short an anchor for the morning show and Jerry tells her she can’t have any more budget to hire someone new.
She decides to take a long shot. Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford) is a crotchety, old news reporter. He’s supposed to have been like an Edward Murrow or Walter Cronkite type, but he’s way passed his heyday. He has a hefty contract that he is finishing out with the network – and he gets paid his salary whether he actually works on a broadcast.
Due to a loophole in his contract, if he is offered a regular gig by the network and he doesn’t take it, he loses the rest of his money. The morning talk show job is the last thing Mike wants to do, but he has hundreds of thousand dollars on the line. He accepts it.
Just because he takes the job, it doesn’t mean he wants to do it. Becky’s biggest challenge as producer is to get Mike to do the job willing. The night before he is supposed to go on air for the first time, he goes on a bender and only makes it to the set because Becky baby-sits him all night long, taking him there by cab for the early morning start time.
Mike and Colleen immediately clash. He thinks she lacks any principles and will do anything on air for ratings – including allowing film crews to shoot footage of invasive medical procedures. Mike wants to hold onto his standards. He plays it straight, reading his pieces as though it where an evening news broadcast. He refuses to participate in any silly banter.
In between all the antics on her show, Becky finds a little time to get to know Adam Bennett (Patrick Wilson.) He is a producer on a news magazine, so he is accepting of her inability to disconnect from work when they are together – to a point.
The problem with the movie, written by Aline Brosh McKenna and directed by Roger Michell, is that it doesn’t really know what point it is trying to make. It seems at times to be a judgment on how much time Becky spends devoted to work to the detriment of her personal life. Mike’s character seems to be there as a high-brow voice of reason who is looking down on all the frivolous fluff Becky puts on the air – his co-anchor sumo wrestles on camera and the weatherman wears a rollercoaster cam. But in the end, Becky gets what she wants for all her hard work and the dumbing-down of the “news” she provides.
Cinequest
The 21 Cinequest Film Festival is finishing up this weekend in downtown San Jose. Though the festival runs for 12 days – and I love movies – I opted just to catch two shorts programs so far. The festival has a variety of feature films and documentary films, as well as visits from a few celebrities, including AnnaSophia Robb and John Turturro.
One of my favorite parts of the festival is the shorts programs because it’s one of the few venues to see good quality short-format films. This is not the stuff of YouTube videos.
Some of these shorts have budgets up to $10,000 or credits that run as long as a feature film. I sat through two shorts programs, “Expectations,” which included 11 films, and “Slanted,” which had five films. The pieces are as unique as the many filmgoers who filled downtown venues throughout the week. Some of the shorts were funny and light-hearted, while others tackled taboo subject matters that were difficult to watch.
Melissa Flores can be reached at [email protected]. For more details on the shorts, visit http://melissa-movielines.blogspot.com.
