Seen Milk?

Carrie and I went on an actual date today: early showing of Milk, the hagiography of Harvey Milk starring Sean Penn, followed by a late lunch at Grand Sichuan 24th St.

We enjoyed the movie. Sean Penn's performance was insanely strong and if there's a performance in a movie this year more worthy of an Oscar I do hope you'll point me to it in the comments, because I want to go see it.

The script was good and had some nuance but maybe was not all it could have been.

Hagiographies shouldn't be written for people who weren't saints, and Milk wasn't, but he was (among other things and in rough chronological order) a Naval officer in the Korean War; a veteran of the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign; an actuarial statistician; a small business owner; a gay activist; and ultimately the first openly gay politician elected to significant public office in the United States. He was assassinated in 1978. [Biography of Harvey Milk on Wikipedia]

The movie doesn't tell his entire life story; we meet the man on his 40th birthday and stay with him for the next eight years, until his life meets its untimely end.

We get one brief vignette of Milk the corporation man, when he, on his birthday, wearing a suit and on his way home from work in Manhattan, picks up a young man on the steps of the IND train.

But for most of the movie, we get Harvey Milk the gay activist and politician.

Whatever strengths the movie might have, and they are many, they are dwarfed by how Sean Penn inhabits the role. He is the strongest aspect by far of a very strong movie.

Harvey Milk understood political theater and was also a very brave man, and the complex, powerful portrait that Sean Penn paints of a highly intelligent man who understands a few key truths about leadership is very very convincing.

We talked about the movie all the way to Grand Sichuan, where we enjoyed soup dumplings, dry-sauteed string beans with minced pork and spicy lamb with fresh ginger.

One of the things we were talking about: When the movie ended in 1978, the HIV virus was already circulating worldwide (it is now estimated to have entered the US around 1969):

The disease has an incubation period of several years, and with a small incidence, was not noticed at first. [Link]

AIDS was about three years from being noticed as an epidemiological phenomenon by the CDC.

And a sizable fraction of the young men we had just "met" in the movie would likely contract AIDS and die in the immediate future.

You see, gentlemen, a pimp's love is very different than a square's

2006 was the year in which one branch of Fox essentially refused to release Mike Judge's dark satire Idiocracy to theaters, while another arm of Fox was giving the full-court publicity press (until public backlash whiplashed all the way into visceral disgust) to OJ Simpson's If I Did It...

You've almost certainly heard of Mike Judge, the brilliant auteur behind Beavis and Butthead, Office Space, and King of the Hill, among others.

Unless you're a film geek, though, you may have never even heard of Idiocracy; Fox showed it in about 100 theaters nationwide, basically to fulfill their obligation for a "theatrical release" before putting it out on DVD.

Well, we just got our hands on one of those DVDs, and this is one funny movie.

Heavy-handed, harsh, and very, very funny.

Reihan Salam's review in Slate explains things nicely:

If Office Space is about taking responsibility for your own happiness, Idiocracy is about something larger, namely our responsibility for our shared future. Like all the best dystopian fables, Idiocracy is a scathing indictment of our own society. And so it begins in the present with a brief portrait of the villains who are destroying America, represented here by an affluent couple and an imbecile ne'er-do-well named Clevon. The two yuppies are shown agonizing over the decision to have a child. It's never the right time, until the right time finally comes—and the couple is infertile. The yuppies will leave no legacy behind. Clevon, in contrast, lustily and enthusiastically impregnates not only his wife but a bevy of gap-toothed harridans, each one dumber and uglier than the next. The screen slowly fills with his spawn, foreshadowing the nightmarish future to come.

What follows is a series of events, including an all-too-brief discussion of the distinction between a pimp's love and the love of a square, that send hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Rita (Maya Rudolph) and the extremely average Army Pvt. Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) into separate hibernation chambers for a supersecret military experiment. Like so many of us, Bowers has spent his life avoiding responsibility. Whenever his commanding officer tells him to "lead, follow, or get out of the way," he invariably chooses to "get out of the way." So, when he is tapped for this dubious honor, he's none too pleased.

Fully expecting to wake up after a year, Joe instead emerges from his icy casket in the year 2505, a nightmarish future populated exclusively by Clevon-like simpletons. The last geniuses died perfecting advanced methods for regrowing hair and sustaining erections, beautifully illustrated by a quick cutaway shot of a lab monkey with what looks to be a Jheri curl, a lit stogie, and a gigantic boner. As a result, the machines that have kept the masses of morons happy and fed are falling apart. Starvation looms as crops die across the land, all because Americans, or rather Uh-mericans, are too stupid to water them with anything besides a colorful sports drink rich in electrolytes.

We laughed, we winced, we're recommending it to everyone we know.

Buy it or rent it today.

Related:

• Idiocracy at the Internet Movie Database
• Idiocracy at Wikipedia

"Where's a good angry mob when you need one?"

In the midst of an otherwise boring article about how movie producers try to deliberately foment outrage in order to boost ticket sales (duh!), this unintentionally hilarious lament from a movie producer who claims that religious conservatives are increasingly harder and harder to bait:

[Mark Urman of ThinkFilm] is now distributing “Shortbus,” an unrated movie with hard-core sex, and he says he has been shocked by the lack of resistance to it from the religious right.

“They see you coming,” he said...

Well, yes, that is one (usually-intended) side effect of putting hard-core sex in a movie.

Negative Publicity Is The New Hype - New York Times, October 27 2006