Milk

Not the dairy product. The movie. We saw it last night. It was fantastic. See it. NOW! Sigh, you didnt go did you? Well you should. Because it was great. Sean Penn was great. Now, I have never seen any actual footage of Harvey Milk. So I cant say that he did a great job at being him. But there are a lot of people who were there who were either in the film, or helped with the film. (Cleve Jones, Anne Kronenberg, Carol Ruth Silver, Danny Nicoletta) And watching the extra features, they seem to love Penn's portrayal, so that is good. Right? Ok, so as a quick summary, Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected to office in the country. And this is the story of his (too short) political career. Emile Hirsch was great as Cleve Jones, Josh Brolin was a pretty creepy Dan White, James Franco was absolutely fantastic as Scott Smith, Alison Pill was great as Anne Kronenberg. Gus Van Sant did a fabulous job mixing the archival footage in with the film and I really liked they way that it was filmed as a whole. I think it is a very important and perhaps prescient comment on many aspect of humanity and American culture in the San Francisco of the 1970s and of America today.

Once you have seen it, or if you know Harvey Milk's feelings on being closeted, you will see how offensive this is. I am not enbedding it here because if you dont know the full story of Harvey Milk, it kinda gives away the ending. But basically Harvey's whole idea for the gay movement was that if everyone came out and everyone was truthful about their sexual orientation, it would move the cause forward. Because it is a lot harder to hate people you know than people you dont know. So people realized that they actually knew gay people (your doctor, your lawyer, your aunt) maybe it would be harder for people to hate them so much. But when Fox News reviewed the movie they describe it as the story of "1970s politician," played by Sean Penn who "smiles a lot," but will probably have a small limited audience. A 1970s politician. Ugh! So yeah. See it.