{"id":1591,"date":"2008-12-03T01:55:57","date_gmt":"2008-12-03T08:55:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=1591"},"modified":"2008-12-03T20:33:45","modified_gmt":"2008-12-04T03:33:45","slug":"milk-gus-van-sant-2008-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=1591","title":{"rendered":"Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008): USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Byron Potau<\/a>.\u00a0 Viewed at the Riviera Theatre, Santa Barabra, CA.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of electing our first black President it would seem fitting to revisit another first in our political history, the election of our first openly gay politician, Supervisor Harvey Milk.\u00a0 However, director Gus Van Sant\u2019s take on the last years of Harvey Milk\u2019s life comes off as maudlin and trite.<\/p>\n

Milk<\/em> <\/a> begins as Harvey (Sean Penn) randomly, and easily, picks up Scott Smith (James Franco) in a subway station and takes him home to have sex.\u00a0 They then go off together, eventually ending up on Castro St. in San Francisco where they open a camera shop.\u00a0 As gays continue to populate the area, Harvey manages to organize them well enough to give them power in their neighborhood.\u00a0 After several failed attempts at public office, Harvey is finally elected Supervisor, but loses Scott in the process, the campaigning having taken its toll on their relationship.\u00a0 Harvey finds himself in another relationship with a man who walks up to his shop one night drunk and offers himself to Harvey.\u00a0 The film then focuses on Harvey\u2019s fight against the Brigg\u2019s Initiative to fire gay teachers, while sprinkling a few tense scenes of Dan White (Josh Brolin) frustrated with Harvey\u2019s lack of support for his own agenda.\u00a0 The film follows through to the assassination of Harvey and Mayor George Moscone by Dan White, and to the candlelight vigil in Harvey\u2019s honor.<\/p>\n

When one has a moving factual story already in place, the worst thing a director can do is overplay it, yet that is exactly what Gus Van Sant does here.\u00a0 It takes bad directing to make an actual assassination feel false;Van Sant is more interested in his own concocted opera motif than the realities of the scene.\u00a0 In trying to heighten the emotion, he renders the scene emotionally void.\u00a0 Just as Van Sant is overplaying the facts, it seems he did not trust that a truly gay actor could portray any of the important gay roles in the film so we are stuck with straight actors acting gay which always has the danger of going overboard.\u00a0 Sean Penn gives a good performance as Harvey, tweaking his voice and adjusting his physical mannerisms to match Harvey\u2019s.\u00a0 Surprisingly good is James Franco as Harvey\u2019s longtime lover Scott Smith.\u00a0 Franco seems comfortable in the seventies setting and opts for subtlety rather than overplaying his part.\u00a0 The same cannot be said for Emile Hirsch as Cleve Jones who looks like Emile Hirsch trying to act gay.\u00a0 It is grating on the nerves and one wonders why a legitimately gay actor could not have played this role.\u00a0 As for the non gay character of Dan White, Josh Brolin fits the part physically, but other than a few superficial arguments we never get a sense of the character and what could have been a complex role goes wasted.\u00a0 Van Sant makes use of a lot of archive footage that does not mesh well with the cinematography of the film.\u00a0 If he was going to do this it seems it would have been better to desaturate the colors more to give it a more authentic seventies look and minimize the discrepancy between his footage and the archive footage.\u00a0 Though Van Sant himself is gay, you get the feeling he has no real sense of Harvey Milk; the film is factual, but flawed and empty.\u00a0 If you want to see a film about Harvey Milk you should stick with the 1984 award winning documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Byron Potau.\u00a0 Viewed at the Riviera Theatre, Santa Barabra, CA. In the aftermath of electing our first black President it would seem fitting to revisit another first in our political history, the election of our first openly gay politician, Supervisor Harvey Milk.\u00a0 However, director Gus Van Sant\u2019s take on the last years of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema-society","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}