Good Night, Goodbye, Good Riddance

Rating: 3/10 (9 January 2006)

OK, so maybe it wasn't that bad. It's another Oscar front-runner that I would have liked to skip, however. Someone had to do a great amount of research, evidenced by all the original archived footage that is spliced into this film. And if you shell out $7 to see it as a matinée, you can listen to all the blue haired people play nostalgia games with each other (quite loudly, by the way) and thus enhance your movie-going experience. It is very very very long; all the effort to make a historically accurate piece eliminated the heart of the film as a whole. It's a snore. The script plods along very slowly with no real arc, but it would work much better on stage and might be adapted for that format very easily. On the other hand, David Straithern is outstanding and his performance alone is well worth the time and money.