Word: milked
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Milk isn't about Dan White, except as a repository of the straights' resentment that dogged Milk and brought him down. The script by Dustin Lance Black, who worked on HBO's polygamy series Big Love (he was the only Mormon on the writing staff), is all about process: how Harvey Milk changed things. His style was charm mixed with genial bullying. He conveyed passion with good humor. In the movie, challenged by White to answer if two men can reproduce, he replies, "No, but God knows we keep trying." On the streets, he'd pick up a bullhorn...
...Designated a "gay politician," Milk was at least as much the latter as the former - a genius in convincing people that what he wanted was what they needed. So is the movie. It revels in showing how Milk built his campaign staff from the lovers and locals who wandered into Castro Camera; how he fought the city's gay establishment, until then discreet in identifying itself; how he debated John Briggs, the sponsor of Prop. 6, to a standstill and was instrumental in having the initiative defeated by more than a million votes. You've never seen this before...
...candidate," Milk says in the movie. "The movement is the candidate." That was false modesty. In California he was the movement's star, its producer and director. And Penn dominates the film - not in his usual way, by making brooding seem like a form of higher calisthenics. Perhaps the least homosexual actor around, Penn here reins in his Method bluster to locate the sweetness and vulnerability beneath Milk's assured persona. He becomes this character - surely far from his experience - with no italicizing, no condescension, no sweat. This isn't an impersonation; it's an inhabiting...
...Luna), as are Van Sant's old camera tropes of slo-mo and unsteady focus. But they aren't at the foreground, In the dichotomy between his audience-pleasing big movies (To Die For, Good Will Hunting) and his audience-resistant art films (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, Paranoid Park), Milk is securely in the former category. It's his most disciplined film - he was hired to direct Black's script, stuck to it, worked well with actors - and easily his best...
...Harvey Milk lived with death threats. In the film, before one rally, he is handed a note reading, "You get the first bullet the minute you stand at the microphone." Black frames the film as a monologue delivered into a tape recorder by Harvey, who's as sure of his impending death as he is of his gay-liberation creed. In the '70s, paranoia was simply common sense; the preceding 10 years had seen the murders of King and Robert Kennedy and assassination attempts on Gerald Ford and George Wallace. The movie is faithful to that grungy time...