{"id":1949,"date":"2008-11-26T01:05:46","date_gmt":"2008-11-26T05:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/?p=1949"},"modified":"2016-01-10T20:55:49","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T01:55:49","slug":"review-milk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/2008\/11\/26\/review-milk\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: MILK"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>His name was Harvey Milk and he wanted to recruit you.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t want to recruit you in the way that his detractors would want you think. He didn\u2019t care if you were gay like he was or straight and he had no interest in getting straight people to convert to homosexuality, if such a thing were possible. He was interested in recruiting to the cause of civil rights for gays, one the last segments of society in the 1970s who were still being legally denied them.<\/p>\n

Director Gus Van Sant\u2019s film Milk examines the activist\u2019s life, from his rise as a community activist in San Francisco\u2019s Castro neighborhood to his election to the city\u2019s Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay man to hold a major public office in the United States to his tragic death at the hands of fellow supervisor Dan White, played with a lantern-jawed intensity by Josh Brolin, in his City Hall office. That\u2019s not really a spoiler, as the movie reveals this in its opening moments for anyone not already familiar with his story. It is an interesting narrative decision and one that permeates each of Harvey\u2019s victories with a subtle sense of foreboding as his path slowly leads him to his fate.<\/p>\n

As portrayed by Sean Penn, Harvey Milk is very much a man whom has greatness thrust upon him by virtue of simply doing what he feels is the right thing. It is a powerful and yet at times subtle performance, with Penn able to balance Harvey\u2019s mixed emotions as his rising political career drives a wedge between him and his lover Scott Smith (James Franco). But when Harvey speaks, there\u2019s a tenor that can often be found in the best of public speakers, be they politicians or preachers. His words reach out and enrapture. It is easy to see how he was able to affect the change that he did.<\/p>\n

<\/a>There are some historians who would argue that the focus of Dan White\u2019s anger that fateful day was Mayor George Moscone and that Milk was only a secondary target for his rage. While there is some brief mention of the tension between White and Moscone, Van Sant\u2019s film focuses more on Milk\u2019s and White\u2019s relationship. White\u2019s strongly conservative upbringing doesn\u2019t equip him for dealing with Harvey as a human being. As he finds the bigoted notions he has about gay men being proven wrong, he finds his world, and his mental stability, crumbling around him.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, although White\u2019s legal defense for the murders – the now infamous \u201cTwinkie Defense,\u201d in which White\u2019s attorney argued that White was imbalanced due to eating too many of the sugary junk food – is mentioned in some text that closes the film, it is never mentioned in the narrative itself. By its exclusion, Van Sant seems to be dismissing the notion and attributing White\u2019s actions to more base and ugly motives.<\/p>\n

There is no denying that the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California, which revoked the right of gay couples to get married, gives the film an extra resonance and power. It may be that we will be unable to judge Milk\u2019s effectiveness as just a movie about a man who fought for social change. For now, though, it serves as a powerful reminder that the change he fought has yet not been fully won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

His name was Harvey Milk and he wanted to recruit you. He didn\u2019t want to recruit you in the way that his detractors would want you think. He didn\u2019t care if you were gay like [click for more]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[406,402,1110,1111],"series":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1949","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-review","7":"tag-gus-van-sant","8":"tag-josh-brolin","9":"tag-milk","10":"tag-sean-penn"},"aioseo_notices":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":false,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1949"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=1949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}