Jonathan Demme created a beautiful celebration of magic and love and life with this movie. The best moments were built outside of plot intricacies but instead summoned out of moments of joy, music, dancing, emotion, and mania.
Jenny Lumet's screenplay can be a bit too obvious and that's what keeps it short of perfect, however, the cast of wonderfully unique faces, and the actors behind those expressions, manage to shuffle the screenplay into dark corners that put the brakes on the celebration at hand. Are you having a good time? Good. Here's another melodramatic downer before you can go back to the nuptial festivities. I kinda like it.
Run to see this if you love movies where you feel you're immersed in their world, where you know everybody there, where you are instantly transported from the darkness of the theater or the comfort of a living room. Very moving stuff.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Sunday, February 01, 2009
MILK
MILK isn't a very good movie and lamentably it isn't a Gus Van Sant film from any auteur standpoint. This is Dustin Lance Black's movie, as was written in every advertisement I've seen, and as his schmaltzy, TV movie screenplay has trumpeted to high heaven with every scene. Everything about MILK reeks of facsimile affection and rainbow coloured cheddar.
Now, I've seen the documentary THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HARVEY MILK and it did more for me and for those interested in his life because it didn't reduce his turbulent love life into soap opera or explain the achievements he earned in a "check off the list" string of sequences. I kept asking myself, is this Hollywood's poor excuse to pedestal some kind of gay martyr? The movie merely expects you to see Milk as a 'great man' without trying. They mention it once in the movie- Milk was great because used politics as a soapbox for equality. Unfortunately for cinema, he didn't do it in any spectacular way, and even if he didn't the movie sure as hell didn't do anything to pronounce that. It's a movie about a man who made speeches and loved men, and sure that may be enough, maybe even great, but it's all in the execution. The direction here fails.
Be wary of any movie where a crippled boy calls at two calculated points in the film to illustrate how Milk has affected his followers. Forget the film that swells up the music as the deceased is brought back to life with a speech he gave before his death just as the credits pop up. Run away from a film that goes back to a scene from the beginning after his murder to make the lines from that first scene appear 'prophetic' or 'transcendental'. There are no lessons here we don't know of or any truths mixed in the glowing whites of the film's photography. Except that Van Sant can continue to show he can make ridiculous Hollywood films when he feels like it and that this is a film that ignores a very important bit of foreshadowing, and you'll notice it when you see the movie, it's this: finish the 'opera' after the fat lady sings.
Now, I've seen the documentary THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HARVEY MILK and it did more for me and for those interested in his life because it didn't reduce his turbulent love life into soap opera or explain the achievements he earned in a "check off the list" string of sequences. I kept asking myself, is this Hollywood's poor excuse to pedestal some kind of gay martyr? The movie merely expects you to see Milk as a 'great man' without trying. They mention it once in the movie- Milk was great because used politics as a soapbox for equality. Unfortunately for cinema, he didn't do it in any spectacular way, and even if he didn't the movie sure as hell didn't do anything to pronounce that. It's a movie about a man who made speeches and loved men, and sure that may be enough, maybe even great, but it's all in the execution. The direction here fails.
Be wary of any movie where a crippled boy calls at two calculated points in the film to illustrate how Milk has affected his followers. Forget the film that swells up the music as the deceased is brought back to life with a speech he gave before his death just as the credits pop up. Run away from a film that goes back to a scene from the beginning after his murder to make the lines from that first scene appear 'prophetic' or 'transcendental'. There are no lessons here we don't know of or any truths mixed in the glowing whites of the film's photography. Except that Van Sant can continue to show he can make ridiculous Hollywood films when he feels like it and that this is a film that ignores a very important bit of foreshadowing, and you'll notice it when you see the movie, it's this: finish the 'opera' after the fat lady sings.