Director Gus Van Sant has taken a break from his often inaccessible forays into (almost) experimental film to make Milk, a very typical Hollywood biopic about Harvey Milk, the nation’s first openly gay man to win major elected office and then assassinated shortly thereafter. I don’t use ‘typical’ pejoratively, rather as an observation of how Van Sant’s film follows most of the conventions of the genre and as a contrast to his other recent work. Van Sant also directed Good Will Hunting – a formulaic Hollywood film that I love.
What makes Milk a great film is how Van Sant’s and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s treatment of the subject matter is so understated. They don’t build Milk up as a messiah – a martyr to the cause of gay rights – instead focusing on him as a man who sees a need for changes in San Francisco and chooses to take action. The soundtrack of period pop music and the skilled editing of Elliot Graham bring a fresh energy to the genre. The production design by Bill Groom and cinematography by Harris Savides give the film an appropriate period looking, using lots of drab earth tones rather than the bright colors often associated with the 70s. Read more »
Scene: Ben Thomas (played with unending weepiness by Will Smith), despondent, in close-up makes a 911 call to report his own impending suicide.
Cut to: Ben swimming in the blue Pacific. His voiceover, in pressing sadness, informs us, “In seven days God created the world. And in seven seconds I shattered mine.” Yet I recall God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. And what about those seven seconds? No explanation is ever offered.
Cut to: Ben making a phone call to the customer service center of a mail-order meat company. The employee handling his call is Ezra Turner (Woody Harrelson), a blind man without an angry bone in his body, as evidenced by his unwillingness to strike back when Ben released a tirade of insults over the phone. This will prove to be Ben’s test of Ezra to discover if he is worthy. Worthy of what is the mystery that unravels over the course of 118 difficult minutes. Read more »
A rare photo of Clint Eastwood not scowling.
The last few years have brought Clint Eastwood a great deal of critical success as a director. He’s recently had a four film streak beginning with
Mystic River in 2003 that have brought three Best Picture Oscar nods, including a winner in
Million Dollar Baby, and renewed praise for the aging movie star. This year Eastwood has given us another two films, each of which has the scent of awards season contenders, but ultimately fail to deliver on the promise of greatness that we may have unfairly come to expect from him.
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Accusations that voting for Obama because he’s black is ‘racist,’ while being semantically accurate, is far from the meaning of racism.
Or it needs a qualifier like ‘people voting for Obama because he’s black do so because they don’t like white people.’ Surely that’s true for at least part of the population but mostly it’s about taking this moment to demonstrate to the country and to the world that the dream in America can be reality. Racism carries with it ignorance, hatred, violence.
You can’t divorce the implications from the word. There is a world of difference between the racism of bigots and hatemongers against Obama and people supporting Obama simply because he’s black.
Confusing the two has the effect of diminishing the true meaning of racism. A decision based predominantly on race? For some, yes. Racist? Not so much. Read more »
Every year since 1997 the American Film Institute puts together a list of great films for television broadcast. First it was the 100 greatest American films followed by the 50 greatest screen legends. Having seemingly plumbed the depths of great film lists — greatest comedies, romances, thrills, movie scores, musicals, movie songs, characters, quotes, inspirational films — and now with a reworking of the 100 greatest films (to appear next week), they will air the ten greatest films representative of ten different genres.
Before the AFI sends ballots to various members of the film industry they begin with an initial list (of 400 films in the case of the original 100 greatest films) from which to select the final list. This year the initial list contains 50 films from each of the ten genres from which ten each will be selected. The genres in questions are: Animation; Fantasy; Gangster; Sci-Fi; Western; Sports; Mystery; Romantic Comedy; Courtroom Drama; Epic.
At the moment the AFI website has made available a list of the 500 nominated films (including a handful of crossovers that appear in two genre lists (Field of Dreams in both Fantasy and Sports). I think some of their choices of genres are a little strange. For example, I found it difficult to even find ten films on the Sports list that I would even bother mentioning in any list of great films.
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