Milk

[originally posted on myspace on June 16, 2010]

(more of a reaction than a review)

Long story short, I now have Netflix, so I am catching up on all the movies (many) I never saw in theaters.

After a string of happy, lighter films, I got Milk in the mail. I was leery. It looked good, but it was a biopic, a biopic on someone (Harvey Milk) who was murdered, so, I mean, it's bound to be dark and sad, right?

No, it wasn't. Yes, it was sad that he was murdered and the reason why he was murdered was sad...but it was really a movie about pushing past your lot in life and trying to make things better for your people, whoever they might be. And, I'm sure, as it's a biopic about a murdered person, it glosses over, it makes him more of a saint than he might have really been, more of a fictional character than real...I had trouble believing he was so focussed on what he was fighting for and that he, essentially, predicted his own death (I'm getting jaded, yes?).

There was a scene, early on, where Milk says he is almost 40 years old and hasn't done anything with his life (this is right before he departs for San Francisco and eventually starts his political career). Who hasn't felt that? To be a particular age and question everything, all the past years and decades and want to do something, anything.

Anyway, it was a good film. At times, a little heavy handed, but overall, really good. Sean Penn is such a good actor. It's scary to think that not that long ago (the late '70s), so close to home (the film shows footage from Miami), the cops were dragging gays out of nightclubs and arresting them.

So, I told my mom what movie I had watched and who it was about. She had no clue who I was talking about. Now, I will admit, I don't remember when I first heard about Harvey Milk, certainly not in any of my history classes in elementary, junior high, high school or college (which is so very sad, but contemporary history is typically never covered...they usually got up to the Industrial Revolution). My mom, however, is a history buff, she was alive when this all happened, she was living in South Florida during the whole Anita Bryant thing. When I referenced Anita Bryant, she knew that name, remembered the whole orange juice connection. I told her that the man who shot Milk, that his lawyers used the "Twinkie Defense" (I had zero idea about that as well, had often heard the "Twinkie Defense" referenced but had no clue it was in relation to Milk).

So, no one knows history. And fairly recently history at that.

On the Netflix website, there were lots of positive reviews, one equating it to a gay version of Malcolm X (and I think this is the biopic formula, so...) and one...one that made no sense to me. One that I read before I watched that made me get a preconceived image of the film before I even watched it (reviews are, for the most part, evil in that way). And as I watched, I got angry at this reviewer, who obviously did not watch the same movie I did.

The reviewer said that the point of the movie was to "push the gay activist agenda" and that there were "disturbing sex scenes."

Yeah, after reading that, I was expecting some explicit scenes (it was a Gus Van Sant movie, after all).

In reality, minimum sex scenes. There were kissing scenes, but it was Milk with two boyfriends from his lifetime, not random one night stands. And the kissing scenes were barely ever on the mouth and both the kissing and sex scenes (two total, I believe) were so fast, so covered in shadows. They were, artistically at the very least, beautiful. That this reviewer could see something "disturbing" in all that, that he (or she) could miss the whole entire point of the movie and dismiss it as "agenda," makes me sad for society and wonder how far we've really come (if at all) in acceptance.