I think this sums up the credibility of the writer.Sabin wrote:Emilio Estevez’s far superior Bobby
To call the entire premise of this article a "stretch" would be too kind.
Milk
To call the entire premise of this article a "stretch" would be too kind.
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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rolotomasi99
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he uses a critique of gus van sant's career and the film MILK as a cover to attack harvey milk -- "too white, too straight acting, too power hungry, too conventional, etc."Sabin wrote:Milk That Dead Horse, Cowboy
With the release of Milk, freaky Gus Van Sant puts gay activism in the ultimate closet: the grave. ARMOND WHITE takes a closer look at how the director’s latest crossover hit-to-be references each perverse stage of his film career.
By Armond White
this is why a movie about martin luther king, jr. has not been made. there is absolutely no way the finished product would not seriously piss off someone.
apparently van sant's greatest sin in making MILK was focusing on harvey milk rather than everyone else in the castro.
"When it comes to the subject of torture, I trust a woman who was married to James Cameron for three years."
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
Milk That Dead Horse, Cowboy
With the release of Milk, freaky Gus Van Sant puts gay activism in the ultimate closet: the grave. ARMOND WHITE takes a closer look at how the director’s latest crossover hit-to-be references each perverse stage of his film career.
By Armond White
HOW DID GUS Van Sant, of all camera-wielding hipsters, come to direct Milk, this year’s official gay martyr movie? Van Sant once expressed his reluctance to be pigeonholed with the gay political movement—a bold, intransigent stance and personally justifiable considering the gap between political posturing and artistic achievement. Yet Milk, the story of San Francisco’s first openly gay politician, County Supervisor Harvey Milk, who in 1979 was gunned-down along with Mayor George Moscone by Dan White, another County Supervisor, turns out to be a bizarre manipulation of the gay political impulse.
Not that Van Sant’s hypocritical. He has the right to assume new political positions; to choose or refuse his alliances, or come into new awareness. But orthodoxy is the last inclination one feels in Van Sant’s other work—such lascivious, nihilistic, proudly degenerate art projects as Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park. Van Sant’s tireless boosters have acclaimed the latter three films a “Death Trilogy” and the assassination climax in Milk, based in historical fact, seems an addendum to that macabre series. He counts down to mortality, with famous liberal-actor Sean Penn safely assuming the role of a now non-threatening historical figure. (What’s next? Denzel Washington scurrying about for Bayard Rustin scripts?) It’s strange when a film that finds apotheosis in death also poses as a memorial to social activism. There’s some dangerous slip into macabre commercialism. It recalls Spike Lee’s domestication of Malcolm X, inevitably weakening the subject’s subversiveness. No wonder the media—mainstream, gay, alternative—has already bowed down to Milk’s sentimental vision. Freaky Van Sant puts gay activism in the ultimate closet: the grave.
I know, that’s not how Milk is being sold; nor is it the way the mainstream will perceive it. Milk has already been acclaimed by the same gatekeepers who ignore all other gaythemed movies—except when they are “legitimized” by famous names and familiar faces. Call this THE BROKEBACK SYNDROME after 2004’s cornball tearjerker Brokeback Mountain which, like Milk, was also released by Focus Features. (They’ve sold this soap before.) With Milk,Van Sant polishes the knack of selling back to the mainstream its own convenient Liberal pretenses. He downplays his usual anti-social penchants (pedophilia, prostitution, masochism, murder) and aggrandizes an historical tragedy. Harvey Milk’s life story—his aim for popular acceptance, institutional recognition and political power—is so unlike Van Sant’s typical low-life subversive’s that it throws the filmmaker’s previous career into question. Is Milk fashionable propaganda, or mere exploitation? Let’s pace Milk with each stage of Van Sant’s career.
Mala Noche (1985): Leaping from a montage of late-1970s gay oppression (bar raids, police harassment, newspaper exposes) to Sean Penn as Milk tape-recording his memoirs, Van Sant introduces his signature arty-vague tactics. Flashbacks show Milk oblivious to this dour social sketch, freely enjoying urban gay life in New York where he first meets Scott (James Franco) who will accompany his move to San Francisco.
Penn’s pouncing on Franco’s curly-haired lovechild recalls the sexual outlawry in Van Sant’s debut film. Milk’s not in opposition to the times or in sync with the era’s rebels; he’s smugly out.Yet it’s never established who these men are as social beings. Disconnecting sexual impudence from political consciousness typifies Van Sant’s methods:The personal is never political.
Drugstore Cowboy (1989): Harvey Milk’s myth begins with his professionalism: opening a camera shop in San Francisco. Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black suggests Milk busted the block of conservative shop-owners but only hints at Milk catering to gay clientele by developing “arty” photography (private porn). Penn scrunches down into his slightly weasley high-pitched mode and does “gay” with Harvey Fierstein-esque mincing gestures.Van Sant creates a demi-monde, like his 1989 break-through junkies movie. Milk’s enclave of Bay Area friends aren’t a community in crisis. This treats politics as a lark, not the dull reality of political organization. It doesn’t capture Milk’s egotism.Van Sant romanticizes as inanely as in that junkie opus.
My Own Private Idaho (1991): Solipsism is Van Sant’s forte and it can ruin a biopic. The home-movie idyll of Milk and Scott driving to San Francisco makes you wonder “who’s holding the Super-8?” But the same insular daze suffuses the entire film.The history of gay liberation occurs at the margins of Milk’s personal story.
Van Sant recreates the cosmetics of the clone era; but his desultory chronicle of Milk’s rise in city government merely touches on his self-consciousness (“No more pot, bathhouses for me and my little Pooh”)—as if we automatically know what comprises ’70s gay life. This solipsism, harkening to Van Sant’s best film: 1991’s My Own Private Idaho. When Scott leaves and a Mexican street kid (Diego Luna) moves in, the repetition of Mala Noche’s condescending racial dynamics clouds Milk’s activism.
Yet, focusing on Milk gives the movement a white idol. It’s a mainstreaming ploy. The unfairly ignored 1995 film Stonewall risked ignominy by concentrating on gay lib’s actual ethnic component. Milk’s story is post-Stonewall; the yuppification of gay struggle.
Van Sant’s romanticized sense of (white) privilege allows critics to commend a particular version of gay assertiveness.
Stonewall was too much about blacks, Italians and drag queens. Instead, Milk’s proposition, “We can have a revolution here but you can’t use the Castro just to cruise, you have to fight,” ignores Bay Area racism for a hollow, bourgeois and risk-free recollection. After a successful boycott, Milk’s egotistical boast, “We just had our first taste of power,” injects the contemporary aphrodisiac of clout—not victory.Van Sant and Black never clarify the distinction because they haven’t really scrutinized Milk’s character.
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993): This 1994 freak parade predicted that Van Sant’s next attempt at an egalitarian epic would mix political correctness and pop sanctimony with mad-scientist precision. Lacking an instinct for demotic entertainment, he depicts Milk’s crew as innocents surrounding a pied piper.The cast, from Lawrence Grabeel to Emile Hirsch, relaxes into gay affectations as casual as they are effeminate (each one described as “cute”), re-imagining the gay ghetto as a homo Oz.This play land of sexual availability is nicely evoked during Penn’s flirtation with Hirsch. Yet when Milk receives a phone call from a hinterlands youth looking for such a place to belong, Van Sant’s reveal of the kid’s circumstances becomes the movie’s maudlin low-point.
To Die For (1995): Conferring faith-healer sanctity upon Milk, Van Sant usurps the revolutionary impact of the Stonewall rebellion and illegitimately applies it to a media-friendly figure.This was also how Van Sant’s hateful, not-so-ironic 1986 satire of careerism worked. Milk’s rallying cry, “I want to recruit you,” flips the criminality of Nicole Kidman’s youth-predator while repeating the basic Van Sant seduction—and seeks votes for it. It’s an insidious repackaging of gay political history.
Good Will Hunting (1997): Among Milk’s many narrative detours, the Anita Bryant section gives the movie a fashionable Left/Right antagonism. It panders to class, as did Van Sant’s biggest hit, 1997’s Good Will Hunting (which many people mistook for a bootstrap Horatio Alger myth). Van Sant goes for easy/ugly laughs.
News footage of conservative celebrity Bryant singing, “Yes Jesus loves me,” unfairly pits an archival villain against a reenacted hero; it services the still-lingering red state-blue state divide. Contrasting Milk’s salutation, “My fellow degenerates,”Van Sant validates the impudence of social apostates— a position intended to rile the Anita Bryants of the world but that a savvy politician would eventually have to disown.
Psycho (1998): Van Sant’s own career consists of repugnant personal films and insincere commercial exercises, like his meticulous 1997 Psycho remake. Studio financing forces discipline on Van Sant’s artiness. His cinematographer Harris Savides scrupulously evokes the 1970s by matching old color doc footage but even this condescends when the image of a gay-bashing aftermath is reflected in the victim’s safety whistle.Van Sant’s formal mastery collapses history into artiness. His slick version of grass-roots motivation misses the urgency of Melvin Van Peebles’ 1995 Panther script.
Without that, Milk’s aestheticized style objectifies Milk’s crusade and blurs the line between rigorous history and haughty conceit.
Finding Forrester (2000): When in pop mode, Van Sant only half-disguises his peccadilloes.The ludicrous 2001 Finding Forrester turned an Affirmative Action premise into a chickenhawk fantasy. Mixing class and sex envy with racial exoticism was hokey-titillating yet exposed Van Sant’s hidden urges and showed his questionable sense of social remedy. Valorizing Milk as if he were a gay Malcolm X continues the inexact equivalence of gay and black civil-rights struggles.
Such rhetoric often leads to breaking ranks rather than race and sex solidarity. By the time a light-skinned Sylvester impersonator performs at Milk’s birthday party, Van Sant’s racial gamesplaying is out of hand. Milk has been praised as the perfect movie for this moment— right after the passing of the Proposition 8 anti-gay marriage bill in California. But that has nothing to do with the movie’s actual quality; it only shows how film criticism is tied to bigbudget, brand name hype. Otherwise, the mainstream media would have supported last month’s propitious Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom, a blackstarred, pro-gay-marriage movie.
Gerry (2002): Van Sant’s artiest, gayest, gainsaying-est movie turned male friendship into a Death Valley walkabout with intimations of lust, murder, personality-theft and exasperating ambiguity. Inadvertantly, it was a convincing testament against male-male love as much as against moviemaking. All the more reason Milk’s single benevolent expression—when he advises a young gays, “You won’t know to the end of your life which ones were your greatest lovers which ones were your greatest friends,” feels out of context.
Elephant (2003): After witchifying Anita Bryant, Van Sant shows bizarre erotic empathy for Dan White. “Is it just me or is he cute?” asks Hirsch’s Cleve Jones. The beefcake shot of a halfnaked White (Josh Brolin) in a fetal curl recalls the assassins’ teasing shower scenes in Elephant. Irony is cheapened by the hint of Milk’s infatuation: “I know what it’s like to live that life, that lie. I can see it in Dan’s eyes.” But we don’t learn till late that Milk was never out to his parents or how he ever lived a lie; his intuition that White acted out of homosexual panic is as synthetic as his infamous “Twinkie Defense.” Only Van Sant would look for a piece of ass in an assassin.
Last Days (2005): Harvey Milk gets the same fuzzy saintliness Van Sant gave Kurt Cobain in Last Days. Van Sant’s fashionably ghoulish death obsession implies a personal romance with oblivion. (He links Milk and White’s fates though a Tosca performance.) This doesn’t make Milk a radical, Werner Scherter biopic—just a peculiar one. Nostalgia vies with mourning. He glosses Milk’s ambition—the redistricting that ensured his victory, rivalry with old-style gay activists. Milk is shown as reprimanding (“This is shit and masturbation, just a coward’s response to a dangerous threat!”) and prognosticating: “If a bullet should enter my brain, let it destroy every closet door.” Is he prescient or a superhero? It’s the latest form of celebrity worship.
Paranoid Park (2007): Following Paranoid Park,Van Sant’s most perversely morbid exercise, it’s naive to read Milk as anything other than a death-mask epic. After a post-assassination—“Doesn’t anybody care?”—set-up, the candle-lit procession of 30, 0000 mourners is the sort of sentimentality expected in a biopic by Ron Howard. It makes Milk’s motto, “Privacy is the enemy,” a bizarre proposition coming from a solipsist-artiste.
The status quo might feel a self-righteous pang while watching this procession, but anyone familiar with filmmakers who elucidate gay struggle (Patrice Chereau, Tsai Ming Liang, Julien Hernandez, Fassbinder and Pasolini, et al.) should detect dubious political commitment in Milk’s maudlin display.
Milk is a guaranteed crossover hit, which carries something of a double-cross by cinching the opportunity to give mainstream media exactly the sanctimonious tearjerker it can easily endorse. Emilio Estevez’s far superior Bobby expressed clear political dedication through the challenge of a summary RFK speech, but I can’t help thinking Van Sant uses Milk’s own pledge, “I’m not a candidate, I’m part of a movement. The movement is the candidate,” to express his own—savviest—career move. Crossing-over is Van Sant’s ultimate perversion.
With the release of Milk, freaky Gus Van Sant puts gay activism in the ultimate closet: the grave. ARMOND WHITE takes a closer look at how the director’s latest crossover hit-to-be references each perverse stage of his film career.
By Armond White
HOW DID GUS Van Sant, of all camera-wielding hipsters, come to direct Milk, this year’s official gay martyr movie? Van Sant once expressed his reluctance to be pigeonholed with the gay political movement—a bold, intransigent stance and personally justifiable considering the gap between political posturing and artistic achievement. Yet Milk, the story of San Francisco’s first openly gay politician, County Supervisor Harvey Milk, who in 1979 was gunned-down along with Mayor George Moscone by Dan White, another County Supervisor, turns out to be a bizarre manipulation of the gay political impulse.
Not that Van Sant’s hypocritical. He has the right to assume new political positions; to choose or refuse his alliances, or come into new awareness. But orthodoxy is the last inclination one feels in Van Sant’s other work—such lascivious, nihilistic, proudly degenerate art projects as Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park. Van Sant’s tireless boosters have acclaimed the latter three films a “Death Trilogy” and the assassination climax in Milk, based in historical fact, seems an addendum to that macabre series. He counts down to mortality, with famous liberal-actor Sean Penn safely assuming the role of a now non-threatening historical figure. (What’s next? Denzel Washington scurrying about for Bayard Rustin scripts?) It’s strange when a film that finds apotheosis in death also poses as a memorial to social activism. There’s some dangerous slip into macabre commercialism. It recalls Spike Lee’s domestication of Malcolm X, inevitably weakening the subject’s subversiveness. No wonder the media—mainstream, gay, alternative—has already bowed down to Milk’s sentimental vision. Freaky Van Sant puts gay activism in the ultimate closet: the grave.
I know, that’s not how Milk is being sold; nor is it the way the mainstream will perceive it. Milk has already been acclaimed by the same gatekeepers who ignore all other gaythemed movies—except when they are “legitimized” by famous names and familiar faces. Call this THE BROKEBACK SYNDROME after 2004’s cornball tearjerker Brokeback Mountain which, like Milk, was also released by Focus Features. (They’ve sold this soap before.) With Milk,Van Sant polishes the knack of selling back to the mainstream its own convenient Liberal pretenses. He downplays his usual anti-social penchants (pedophilia, prostitution, masochism, murder) and aggrandizes an historical tragedy. Harvey Milk’s life story—his aim for popular acceptance, institutional recognition and political power—is so unlike Van Sant’s typical low-life subversive’s that it throws the filmmaker’s previous career into question. Is Milk fashionable propaganda, or mere exploitation? Let’s pace Milk with each stage of Van Sant’s career.
Mala Noche (1985): Leaping from a montage of late-1970s gay oppression (bar raids, police harassment, newspaper exposes) to Sean Penn as Milk tape-recording his memoirs, Van Sant introduces his signature arty-vague tactics. Flashbacks show Milk oblivious to this dour social sketch, freely enjoying urban gay life in New York where he first meets Scott (James Franco) who will accompany his move to San Francisco.
Penn’s pouncing on Franco’s curly-haired lovechild recalls the sexual outlawry in Van Sant’s debut film. Milk’s not in opposition to the times or in sync with the era’s rebels; he’s smugly out.Yet it’s never established who these men are as social beings. Disconnecting sexual impudence from political consciousness typifies Van Sant’s methods:The personal is never political.
Drugstore Cowboy (1989): Harvey Milk’s myth begins with his professionalism: opening a camera shop in San Francisco. Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black suggests Milk busted the block of conservative shop-owners but only hints at Milk catering to gay clientele by developing “arty” photography (private porn). Penn scrunches down into his slightly weasley high-pitched mode and does “gay” with Harvey Fierstein-esque mincing gestures.Van Sant creates a demi-monde, like his 1989 break-through junkies movie. Milk’s enclave of Bay Area friends aren’t a community in crisis. This treats politics as a lark, not the dull reality of political organization. It doesn’t capture Milk’s egotism.Van Sant romanticizes as inanely as in that junkie opus.
My Own Private Idaho (1991): Solipsism is Van Sant’s forte and it can ruin a biopic. The home-movie idyll of Milk and Scott driving to San Francisco makes you wonder “who’s holding the Super-8?” But the same insular daze suffuses the entire film.The history of gay liberation occurs at the margins of Milk’s personal story.
Van Sant recreates the cosmetics of the clone era; but his desultory chronicle of Milk’s rise in city government merely touches on his self-consciousness (“No more pot, bathhouses for me and my little Pooh”)—as if we automatically know what comprises ’70s gay life. This solipsism, harkening to Van Sant’s best film: 1991’s My Own Private Idaho. When Scott leaves and a Mexican street kid (Diego Luna) moves in, the repetition of Mala Noche’s condescending racial dynamics clouds Milk’s activism.
Yet, focusing on Milk gives the movement a white idol. It’s a mainstreaming ploy. The unfairly ignored 1995 film Stonewall risked ignominy by concentrating on gay lib’s actual ethnic component. Milk’s story is post-Stonewall; the yuppification of gay struggle.
Van Sant’s romanticized sense of (white) privilege allows critics to commend a particular version of gay assertiveness.
Stonewall was too much about blacks, Italians and drag queens. Instead, Milk’s proposition, “We can have a revolution here but you can’t use the Castro just to cruise, you have to fight,” ignores Bay Area racism for a hollow, bourgeois and risk-free recollection. After a successful boycott, Milk’s egotistical boast, “We just had our first taste of power,” injects the contemporary aphrodisiac of clout—not victory.Van Sant and Black never clarify the distinction because they haven’t really scrutinized Milk’s character.
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993): This 1994 freak parade predicted that Van Sant’s next attempt at an egalitarian epic would mix political correctness and pop sanctimony with mad-scientist precision. Lacking an instinct for demotic entertainment, he depicts Milk’s crew as innocents surrounding a pied piper.The cast, from Lawrence Grabeel to Emile Hirsch, relaxes into gay affectations as casual as they are effeminate (each one described as “cute”), re-imagining the gay ghetto as a homo Oz.This play land of sexual availability is nicely evoked during Penn’s flirtation with Hirsch. Yet when Milk receives a phone call from a hinterlands youth looking for such a place to belong, Van Sant’s reveal of the kid’s circumstances becomes the movie’s maudlin low-point.
To Die For (1995): Conferring faith-healer sanctity upon Milk, Van Sant usurps the revolutionary impact of the Stonewall rebellion and illegitimately applies it to a media-friendly figure.This was also how Van Sant’s hateful, not-so-ironic 1986 satire of careerism worked. Milk’s rallying cry, “I want to recruit you,” flips the criminality of Nicole Kidman’s youth-predator while repeating the basic Van Sant seduction—and seeks votes for it. It’s an insidious repackaging of gay political history.
Good Will Hunting (1997): Among Milk’s many narrative detours, the Anita Bryant section gives the movie a fashionable Left/Right antagonism. It panders to class, as did Van Sant’s biggest hit, 1997’s Good Will Hunting (which many people mistook for a bootstrap Horatio Alger myth). Van Sant goes for easy/ugly laughs.
News footage of conservative celebrity Bryant singing, “Yes Jesus loves me,” unfairly pits an archival villain against a reenacted hero; it services the still-lingering red state-blue state divide. Contrasting Milk’s salutation, “My fellow degenerates,”Van Sant validates the impudence of social apostates— a position intended to rile the Anita Bryants of the world but that a savvy politician would eventually have to disown.
Psycho (1998): Van Sant’s own career consists of repugnant personal films and insincere commercial exercises, like his meticulous 1997 Psycho remake. Studio financing forces discipline on Van Sant’s artiness. His cinematographer Harris Savides scrupulously evokes the 1970s by matching old color doc footage but even this condescends when the image of a gay-bashing aftermath is reflected in the victim’s safety whistle.Van Sant’s formal mastery collapses history into artiness. His slick version of grass-roots motivation misses the urgency of Melvin Van Peebles’ 1995 Panther script.
Without that, Milk’s aestheticized style objectifies Milk’s crusade and blurs the line between rigorous history and haughty conceit.
Finding Forrester (2000): When in pop mode, Van Sant only half-disguises his peccadilloes.The ludicrous 2001 Finding Forrester turned an Affirmative Action premise into a chickenhawk fantasy. Mixing class and sex envy with racial exoticism was hokey-titillating yet exposed Van Sant’s hidden urges and showed his questionable sense of social remedy. Valorizing Milk as if he were a gay Malcolm X continues the inexact equivalence of gay and black civil-rights struggles.
Such rhetoric often leads to breaking ranks rather than race and sex solidarity. By the time a light-skinned Sylvester impersonator performs at Milk’s birthday party, Van Sant’s racial gamesplaying is out of hand. Milk has been praised as the perfect movie for this moment— right after the passing of the Proposition 8 anti-gay marriage bill in California. But that has nothing to do with the movie’s actual quality; it only shows how film criticism is tied to bigbudget, brand name hype. Otherwise, the mainstream media would have supported last month’s propitious Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom, a blackstarred, pro-gay-marriage movie.
Gerry (2002): Van Sant’s artiest, gayest, gainsaying-est movie turned male friendship into a Death Valley walkabout with intimations of lust, murder, personality-theft and exasperating ambiguity. Inadvertantly, it was a convincing testament against male-male love as much as against moviemaking. All the more reason Milk’s single benevolent expression—when he advises a young gays, “You won’t know to the end of your life which ones were your greatest lovers which ones were your greatest friends,” feels out of context.
Elephant (2003): After witchifying Anita Bryant, Van Sant shows bizarre erotic empathy for Dan White. “Is it just me or is he cute?” asks Hirsch’s Cleve Jones. The beefcake shot of a halfnaked White (Josh Brolin) in a fetal curl recalls the assassins’ teasing shower scenes in Elephant. Irony is cheapened by the hint of Milk’s infatuation: “I know what it’s like to live that life, that lie. I can see it in Dan’s eyes.” But we don’t learn till late that Milk was never out to his parents or how he ever lived a lie; his intuition that White acted out of homosexual panic is as synthetic as his infamous “Twinkie Defense.” Only Van Sant would look for a piece of ass in an assassin.
Last Days (2005): Harvey Milk gets the same fuzzy saintliness Van Sant gave Kurt Cobain in Last Days. Van Sant’s fashionably ghoulish death obsession implies a personal romance with oblivion. (He links Milk and White’s fates though a Tosca performance.) This doesn’t make Milk a radical, Werner Scherter biopic—just a peculiar one. Nostalgia vies with mourning. He glosses Milk’s ambition—the redistricting that ensured his victory, rivalry with old-style gay activists. Milk is shown as reprimanding (“This is shit and masturbation, just a coward’s response to a dangerous threat!”) and prognosticating: “If a bullet should enter my brain, let it destroy every closet door.” Is he prescient or a superhero? It’s the latest form of celebrity worship.
Paranoid Park (2007): Following Paranoid Park,Van Sant’s most perversely morbid exercise, it’s naive to read Milk as anything other than a death-mask epic. After a post-assassination—“Doesn’t anybody care?”—set-up, the candle-lit procession of 30, 0000 mourners is the sort of sentimentality expected in a biopic by Ron Howard. It makes Milk’s motto, “Privacy is the enemy,” a bizarre proposition coming from a solipsist-artiste.
The status quo might feel a self-righteous pang while watching this procession, but anyone familiar with filmmakers who elucidate gay struggle (Patrice Chereau, Tsai Ming Liang, Julien Hernandez, Fassbinder and Pasolini, et al.) should detect dubious political commitment in Milk’s maudlin display.
Milk is a guaranteed crossover hit, which carries something of a double-cross by cinching the opportunity to give mainstream media exactly the sanctimonious tearjerker it can easily endorse. Emilio Estevez’s far superior Bobby expressed clear political dedication through the challenge of a summary RFK speech, but I can’t help thinking Van Sant uses Milk’s own pledge, “I’m not a candidate, I’m part of a movement. The movement is the candidate,” to express his own—savviest—career move. Crossing-over is Van Sant’s ultimate perversion.
"How's the despair?"
Why Can't A Kiss Just Be a Kiss?
He Locked Lips in 'Milk,' Now He Should Zip 'Em
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 9, 2008; Page C01
Poor James Franco. (And poor Sean Penn. But for the moment, poor James Franco.)
In the relentless publicity interviews he's been doing for his new movie, "Milk," there's plenty to ask about his performance as the neglected lover of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, the gay rights martyr. So what does every interviewer -- from David Letterman to the Philippine Daily Inquirer to public radio's Terry Gross -- want to discuss most, over and over and over?
The kissing.
Wasn't it really difficult to kiss another man? Implied: Without throwing up, seeing as you're so obviously straight? What were you thinking as you kissed? Did you rehearse it? What was it liiiiiike?
Underlying the questions (and the answers) is this notion that a gay kissing scene must be the worst Hollywood job hazard that a male actor could face, including stunt work, extreme weather or sitting through five hours of special-effects makeup every day. We live comfortably, if strangely, in a pseudo-Sapphic era in which seemingly every college woman with a MySpace page has kissed another girl for the camera; but for men who kiss men, it's still the final frontier.
There's a whiff of discomfort of the Seinfeldian, "not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-it" variety. It's a post-ironic, post-homophobic homophobia, the kind seen most weeks in "Saturday Night Live" sketches or in any Judd Apatow movie.
Judging from their interviews over the years, actors who have filmed scenes in which they have pointed a revolver at someone's head and pulled the trigger still think gay kissing is the grossest thing they've ever had to do for a movie. Franco has tried to walk a fine line of laughing along in such interviews, while pointing out that "Milk" is essentially a movie about fighting for acceptance. He's had to rehash the same kissing stories again and again:
No, he and Sean Penn did not rehearse the kissing. Yes, one scene involved more than a minute of continuous kissing with Penn on Castro Street in front of hundreds of people. Yes, there were breath mints. Yes, it was strange, but no more so than a scene in which he had to cook dinner, which he would never, ever do in real life.
"I didn't want to screw it up," Franco told Letterman on "Late Show" last week.
"See, if it's me, I'm kind of hoping I do screw it up," Letterman shot back. "That's what you want, isn't it?"
"To screw it up?" Franco asked.
"I mean, do you really want to be good at kissing a guy?" Letterman said as his audience howled with delight.
"If you wanted, I'd be willing to kiss you right now," Franco offered. (And then he kissed Dave on the cheek. Cue more screams from audience.)
"This kind of thing goes on any time there's a movie where two men kiss; and whether it's a gay audience or a mainstream audience, it's something everyone wants to know about. It's titillating," says Corey Scholibo, entertainment editor for the Advocate magazine.
"At a certain point, the joking about it . . . just isn't funny anymore," he says. "And it's disappointing for gay people. It's especially not as funny as it might have been a month ago, before Proposition 8 was passed," amending California's constitution to forbid gay marriage.
"No one ever asks Neil Patrick Harris what it's like to play a straight guy who sleeps with lots of women" on the sitcom "How I Met Your Mother," Scholibo says. "No one ever asks him how 'gross' it is to kiss a woman."
To answer this, Scholibo takes off his gay media hat and puts forth the biggest academic "duh" in cultural studies: "Everything in culture is rooted in the idea of masculinity, patriarchy . . . hegemony. You have to be disgusted by two men kissing, otherwise there goes [your] masculinity. If an actor were to say he enjoyed a scene where he kisses another man, then he's somehow less of a man."
Straight actors who've taken on gay roles usually give the same answer -- a combination of disgust, bravado (resolving to get through it and earn their paycheck) and the sure-is-weird feeling of stubble not their own.
"Soon as they say 'cut,' you spit. You want to go to a strip bar or touch the makeup girls. You feel dirty. It's a tough job," Chris Potter, an actor in Showtime's "Queer as Folk," once told MSNBC. (Another actor from that show, Hal Sparks, was more circumspect: "Definitely there's an ick factor. It's a little bit like French-kissing your dad. When you don't have the internal impetus that makes you gay in the first place, you're kind of flying blind in that area. I don't get it. But then that's even more evidence, I think, for the argument that people should be allowed to be who they are.")
Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger fielded kissing questions a thousand different ways when "Brokeback Mountain" was released in 2005. After the stubble answer ("One word," Gyllenhaal told People about Ledger's face: "Exfoliate") and the ooky answer ("That why we had stunt doubles," Ledger quipped about the love scenes to CBS's "Early Show"), after all the stale "I wish I knew how to quit you" jokes and the "Best Kiss" prize from the MTV Movie Awards, Gyllenhaal finally started telling interviewers that it was like kissing anybody else -- "like doing a love scene with a woman I'm not particularly attracted to," he told the London Telegraph.
Rex Wockner, a syndicated San Diego journalist who for nearly two decades has diligently compiled a weekly "Quote Unquote" column of people talking about gay-related topics, shared some of his favorite "kissing" quotes from celebrity interviews. The most common theme? Weirdness, revulsion and finally surrender.
Here's macho man Colin Farrell, talking about his gay love scenes in "Alexander" in 2004: "I didn't enjoy kissing the men any more than I am sure a gay guy would enjoy licking a woman's [bleep]. I find it repulsive when a guy's stubble is pressed against my lip."
Dennis Quaid told the Associated Press in 2002 about getting it just right in "Far From Heaven": "By Take 3 it was just fine, just another scene. We both went after each other like a couple of linebackers to begin with. And [director Todd Haynes] had to, like, stop . . . and say, 'Hey, it's a '50s screen kiss, okay?' "
Toby Jones seemed over the moon in 2007, discussing his kiss with Daniel Craig in "Infamous," the other Truman Capote movie: "I've never dreamt that I would kiss James Bond. . . . Now I've done it, I can say that I hope I am the first of many. . . . It was slightly abrasive, but ultimately rewarding. And neither of us are gay." (Not that there's anything -- eh, you know.)
Women actors who've kissed other women in love scenes, meanwhile, sound like an enlightened other species in interviews about kissing. For them, it's no big whoop. The men, on the other hand, talk as if they've outdone themselves and are now ready to accept their golden statue.
"These answers do often sort of seem to play to the assumed homo-discomfort of the audience," Wockner says. "I mean, a long, long time ago, I kissed girls. It wasn't gross, it just wasn't all that interesting. But kissing a guy for the first time, that felt very different. So if these actors were being fully honest, rather than going for laughs or guffaws or playing to the assumed gay-kissing phobia of the audience, [they] would instead say, 'You know, it was just sort of uninteresting, sort of not really anything. . . .' "
Kissing, after all, is kissing, and it feels great.
Unless it doesn't.
Time Out Chicago: Has every interviewer asked you about kissing Sean Penn?
James Franco: Uh, yes. [Laughs.]
Time Out Chicago: And you say it was uncomfortable because of his fake moustache?
Franco: I told that once, and yeah, I mean, I don't want to make it sound like -- I feel bad -- that kind of makes it sound like it was the worst thing in the world. It wasn't.
Edited By flipp525 on 1228843231
He Locked Lips in 'Milk,' Now He Should Zip 'Em
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 9, 2008; Page C01
Poor James Franco. (And poor Sean Penn. But for the moment, poor James Franco.)
In the relentless publicity interviews he's been doing for his new movie, "Milk," there's plenty to ask about his performance as the neglected lover of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, the gay rights martyr. So what does every interviewer -- from David Letterman to the Philippine Daily Inquirer to public radio's Terry Gross -- want to discuss most, over and over and over?
The kissing.
Wasn't it really difficult to kiss another man? Implied: Without throwing up, seeing as you're so obviously straight? What were you thinking as you kissed? Did you rehearse it? What was it liiiiiike?
Underlying the questions (and the answers) is this notion that a gay kissing scene must be the worst Hollywood job hazard that a male actor could face, including stunt work, extreme weather or sitting through five hours of special-effects makeup every day. We live comfortably, if strangely, in a pseudo-Sapphic era in which seemingly every college woman with a MySpace page has kissed another girl for the camera; but for men who kiss men, it's still the final frontier.
There's a whiff of discomfort of the Seinfeldian, "not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-it" variety. It's a post-ironic, post-homophobic homophobia, the kind seen most weeks in "Saturday Night Live" sketches or in any Judd Apatow movie.
Judging from their interviews over the years, actors who have filmed scenes in which they have pointed a revolver at someone's head and pulled the trigger still think gay kissing is the grossest thing they've ever had to do for a movie. Franco has tried to walk a fine line of laughing along in such interviews, while pointing out that "Milk" is essentially a movie about fighting for acceptance. He's had to rehash the same kissing stories again and again:
No, he and Sean Penn did not rehearse the kissing. Yes, one scene involved more than a minute of continuous kissing with Penn on Castro Street in front of hundreds of people. Yes, there were breath mints. Yes, it was strange, but no more so than a scene in which he had to cook dinner, which he would never, ever do in real life.
"I didn't want to screw it up," Franco told Letterman on "Late Show" last week.
"See, if it's me, I'm kind of hoping I do screw it up," Letterman shot back. "That's what you want, isn't it?"
"To screw it up?" Franco asked.
"I mean, do you really want to be good at kissing a guy?" Letterman said as his audience howled with delight.
"If you wanted, I'd be willing to kiss you right now," Franco offered. (And then he kissed Dave on the cheek. Cue more screams from audience.)
"This kind of thing goes on any time there's a movie where two men kiss; and whether it's a gay audience or a mainstream audience, it's something everyone wants to know about. It's titillating," says Corey Scholibo, entertainment editor for the Advocate magazine.
"At a certain point, the joking about it . . . just isn't funny anymore," he says. "And it's disappointing for gay people. It's especially not as funny as it might have been a month ago, before Proposition 8 was passed," amending California's constitution to forbid gay marriage.
"No one ever asks Neil Patrick Harris what it's like to play a straight guy who sleeps with lots of women" on the sitcom "How I Met Your Mother," Scholibo says. "No one ever asks him how 'gross' it is to kiss a woman."
To answer this, Scholibo takes off his gay media hat and puts forth the biggest academic "duh" in cultural studies: "Everything in culture is rooted in the idea of masculinity, patriarchy . . . hegemony. You have to be disgusted by two men kissing, otherwise there goes [your] masculinity. If an actor were to say he enjoyed a scene where he kisses another man, then he's somehow less of a man."
Straight actors who've taken on gay roles usually give the same answer -- a combination of disgust, bravado (resolving to get through it and earn their paycheck) and the sure-is-weird feeling of stubble not their own.
"Soon as they say 'cut,' you spit. You want to go to a strip bar or touch the makeup girls. You feel dirty. It's a tough job," Chris Potter, an actor in Showtime's "Queer as Folk," once told MSNBC. (Another actor from that show, Hal Sparks, was more circumspect: "Definitely there's an ick factor. It's a little bit like French-kissing your dad. When you don't have the internal impetus that makes you gay in the first place, you're kind of flying blind in that area. I don't get it. But then that's even more evidence, I think, for the argument that people should be allowed to be who they are.")
Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger fielded kissing questions a thousand different ways when "Brokeback Mountain" was released in 2005. After the stubble answer ("One word," Gyllenhaal told People about Ledger's face: "Exfoliate") and the ooky answer ("That why we had stunt doubles," Ledger quipped about the love scenes to CBS's "Early Show"), after all the stale "I wish I knew how to quit you" jokes and the "Best Kiss" prize from the MTV Movie Awards, Gyllenhaal finally started telling interviewers that it was like kissing anybody else -- "like doing a love scene with a woman I'm not particularly attracted to," he told the London Telegraph.
Rex Wockner, a syndicated San Diego journalist who for nearly two decades has diligently compiled a weekly "Quote Unquote" column of people talking about gay-related topics, shared some of his favorite "kissing" quotes from celebrity interviews. The most common theme? Weirdness, revulsion and finally surrender.
Here's macho man Colin Farrell, talking about his gay love scenes in "Alexander" in 2004: "I didn't enjoy kissing the men any more than I am sure a gay guy would enjoy licking a woman's [bleep]. I find it repulsive when a guy's stubble is pressed against my lip."
Dennis Quaid told the Associated Press in 2002 about getting it just right in "Far From Heaven": "By Take 3 it was just fine, just another scene. We both went after each other like a couple of linebackers to begin with. And [director Todd Haynes] had to, like, stop . . . and say, 'Hey, it's a '50s screen kiss, okay?' "
Toby Jones seemed over the moon in 2007, discussing his kiss with Daniel Craig in "Infamous," the other Truman Capote movie: "I've never dreamt that I would kiss James Bond. . . . Now I've done it, I can say that I hope I am the first of many. . . . It was slightly abrasive, but ultimately rewarding. And neither of us are gay." (Not that there's anything -- eh, you know.)
Women actors who've kissed other women in love scenes, meanwhile, sound like an enlightened other species in interviews about kissing. For them, it's no big whoop. The men, on the other hand, talk as if they've outdone themselves and are now ready to accept their golden statue.
"These answers do often sort of seem to play to the assumed homo-discomfort of the audience," Wockner says. "I mean, a long, long time ago, I kissed girls. It wasn't gross, it just wasn't all that interesting. But kissing a guy for the first time, that felt very different. So if these actors were being fully honest, rather than going for laughs or guffaws or playing to the assumed gay-kissing phobia of the audience, [they] would instead say, 'You know, it was just sort of uninteresting, sort of not really anything. . . .' "
Kissing, after all, is kissing, and it feels great.
Unless it doesn't.
Time Out Chicago: Has every interviewer asked you about kissing Sean Penn?
James Franco: Uh, yes. [Laughs.]
Time Out Chicago: And you say it was uncomfortable because of his fake moustache?
Franco: I told that once, and yeah, I mean, I don't want to make it sound like -- I feel bad -- that kind of makes it sound like it was the worst thing in the world. It wasn't.
Edited By flipp525 on 1228843231
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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rolotomasi99
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okey-dokey!flipp525 wrote:rolotomasi99 wrote:have you heard something negative about hoffman's performance?
No, I haven't, but at this juncture you can't really use the term "lock" for any other contender in that category besides Ledger.
"When it comes to the subject of torture, I trust a woman who was married to James Cameron for three years."
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
rolotomasi99 wrote:have you heard something negative about hoffman's performance?
No, I haven't, but at this juncture you can't really use the term "lock" for any other contender in that category besides Ledger.
Edited By flipp525 on 1228258882
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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rolotomasi99
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flipp525 wrote:rolotomasi99 wrote:health ledger and philip seymour hoffman seem like pretty good locks to me.
The only true "lock" in Best Supporting Actor at this point in the game is Heath Ledger.
...because you say so?
i said lock just because both their roles are meaty and the category is uncrowded. i have been avoiding too many early reviews of DOUBT because i do not want spoilers, but what i have caught on movie sites is that streep, hoffman, and davis all give equally incredible performances that stay with you long after the film is done. ryan does a good job too, but is overshadowed by the other three performers. that is why i felt comfortable about saying lock. going for supporting may be unfair to true supporting actors, but it seems a smart move for hoffman since lead actor is a bit more competitive this year.
have you heard something negative about hoffman's performance?
Edited By rolotomasi99 on 1228256142
"When it comes to the subject of torture, I trust a woman who was married to James Cameron for three years."
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
Cleve Jones (the Emile Hirsch character) is very much alive, as is Anne Kronenberg (played by Alison Pill), who works for the Department of Public Health in San Francisco. The other principals, sadly, are all gone: Dan White (Josh Brolin) and Jack Lira (Diego Luna) both committed suicide, Scott Smith (James Franco) died of AIDS in the 80s, Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) and George Moscone (Victor Garber) were, of course, murdered.Greg wrote:Does anyone know for sure; but, I think the Emile Hirsch character is the only one of the principals that is still alive?
rolotomasi99 wrote:health ledger and philip seymour hoffman seem like pretty good locks to me.
The only true "lock" in Best Supporting Actor at this point in the game is Heath Ledger.
Edited By flipp525 on 1228253017
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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rolotomasi99
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your first statement is very possible, but your second statement is also true.The Original BJ wrote:I'm wondering if the fact that people seem split about which of the three Milk supporting men are the strongest will hurt them in getting nominations (I'm having a particularly hard time imagining ALL of them placing.)
That said, there don't seem to be a ton of options from which to choose this year for this category.
health ledger and philip seymour hoffman seem like pretty good locks to me.
michael shannon and maybe robert downey jr. are the only other names i have seen floating around as a possibility. sure, someone could come out of nowhere from a film not yet released yet (DEFIANCE, FROST/NIXON, or THE READER) or one that has come and gone (W or BURN AFTER READING).
beyond just the quality of the performances, all three men have other things going for them to earn a nomination. it helps that their film will probably ride a wave of approval as a best picture nominee, with a strong chance of winning several categories.
aslo, each actor has another performance that adds to their profile as an actor to nominate (though none of the performances have the potential to compete with their MILK nomination). hirsch has residual praise from INTO THE WILD, while brolin and franco have double praise this year for W and PINEAPPLE EXPRESS respectively.
it has been a while since a triple nomination in an acting category (THE GODFATHER 2 if memory serves me), but i think this year it could happen. i would say all three actors have equal shots at nominations, and it is entirely possible they could all three be nominated.
"When it comes to the subject of torture, I trust a woman who was married to James Cameron for three years."
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
The Original BJ wrote:Flipp, why do you think Brolin's chances have been debunked by the actual film? I certainly think being everywhere recently helps, but I thought Brolin gave an interesting performance in Milk; I wouldn't mind seeing him nominated.
Brolin was good in the role, perfectly capturing that mix of disgust and political tongue-biting that Dan White intrinsically knew had to be done in order to appease his constituents. He also left White's ultimate motives as ambiguous and unexplained as they are today. The screenplay did a great job at hinting towards various culminating factors. By no means was it not a good performance; it just impressed me the least out of the three.
Franco conveyed a seamless evervescence in his performance that I found very organic and believable. It might not have looked like the most interesting role, but I found it one of the most human, alongside Penn's.
Hirsch was hoot throughout and stole practically every scene he was in. The moment where he picks up the blow horn and leads the crowd is just wonderful. It was also very "hustler with a heart of gold" which has worked well for correlating female supporting performances in the past come awards time.
Edited By flipp525 on 1228242899
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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The Original BJ
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I'm wondering if the fact that people seem split about which of the three Milk supporting men are the strongest will hurt them in getting nominations (I'm having a particularly hard time imagining ALL of them placing.)
That said, there don't seem to be a ton of options from which to choose this year for this category.
Flipp, why do you think Brolin's chances have been debunked by the actual film? I certainly think being everywhere recently helps, but I thought Brolin gave an interesting performance in Milk; I wouldn't mind seeing him nominated.
What does help Franco is that he has the film's biggest role, but I think his character is the least interesting of the major players.
That said, there don't seem to be a ton of options from which to choose this year for this category.
Flipp, why do you think Brolin's chances have been debunked by the actual film? I certainly think being everywhere recently helps, but I thought Brolin gave an interesting performance in Milk; I wouldn't mind seeing him nominated.
What does help Franco is that he has the film's biggest role, but I think his character is the least interesting of the major players.
