Word: milkings
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...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...
...David Mixner notes, "almost every state has at least one openly gay or lesbian elected official, including Alabama, Montana and Oklahoma." The gay subculture is a hip harbinger of official culture and can boast its own nationwide cable network in Logo (two if you count Bravo!). Homocentric movies like Milk have replaced homophobic movies like Advise and Consent; and in TIME you read reviews like this instead of the 1962 review of Victim...
...Three decades ago, Milk and his ilk were able to enlist President Jimmy Carter and future President Ronald Reagan in the gay fight against Prop. 6. But this fall, Barack Obama was all but mute on Prop. 8. Some community organizers, like the President-elect, are more cautious than others. It's a shame Harvey Milk wasn't around to recruit...