Milk

[ellen_datlow]

Today I saw Milk and it's a terrific depiction of the rise and assassination of the first openly gay man elected to office in the US. I saw the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk when it came out and it was very good (and deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Documentary) but this dramatization, incidentally based on the documentary, brings several new things to the story.

Sean Penn's brilliant acting makes Harvey Milk larger than life -which in the movie he is and should be--he's the embodiment of a major civil rights movement that has been building momentum since Stonewall and through the AIDS epidemic. The movie also brings to life Dan White, the man who murdered him and SF mayor George Moscone. Josh Brolin is excellent and terribly believable in the role of a man too tightly wound not to snap. (Brolin did a great job in W too).

Alison Pill was unrecognizable (to me) as Anne Kronenberg, the woman brought in to manage Milk's campaign. I'd seen her on Broadway in The Lieutenant of Innishmore by Martin McDonagh and Mauritius by Theresa Rebeck, and didn't realize it was the same actor (possibly because of the curly hair).

James Franco was also wonderful.

Weirdly, but he and Brolin were in the movie I watched last weekend, In the Valley of Elah--I didn't recognize Franco at all (just noodled around the web to find a still of him in the movie--and had no idea! Franco is cuuuuute and sometimes resembles my two cousins...

Penn's going to win the Oscar for Best Actor....bet on it.

Comments

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

I saw Gump in the middle of its cultural zeitgeist and it rubbed me very seriously the wrong way. I came away from the theater sort of liking it but within a couple of days, after I'd started to digest the way all the pieces fit together it all started to feel terribly anti-intellectual.

Outside its zeitgeist, I suspect it's a different movie.

This makes me doubly interested in what you think of Benjamin Button when you get around to seeing it. It's got all the most objectively annoying tics that Gump had (no dramatic moment passes without being given a fortune-cookie slogan), but the feel is subtly different.

Thank goodness!

[themadblonde]

I was beginning to think my husband, mother, & I were the only ones who really didn't like it. It just seemed so, so CAPITALIST in its sentiments- "see, this guy is simple, but he works REALLY hard & never complains so he is famous & rich." The misogynistic angle was pretty harsh too.

Re: Thank goodness!

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Karen, in fact your views were the most popular I've heard in the backlash against it.
I don't see it that way at all. To me, it's more a comment on the zeitgeist of the time with a simple minded person's pov. He's a Zelig rather than a real person. I didn't find it particularly misogynistic either.

Interesting

[themadblonde]

I heard almost nothing but praise for it as a "feel good" movie out here in the midwest. Sort of like Wall-E. Also funny that I subconsciously associated "Benjamin Button" with "that kind" of movie (& therefore had no interest in seeing it) long before I knew it shared screenwriters.

Re: Interesting

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

That's when it first came out and was why I didn't go see it.
However, within 2-3 years aftewards it seemed to have picked up an enormous backlash.
And watching it last year, it sure wasn't a "feelgood" movie. I think viewers just didn't get it at all if that's what they thought.