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XXV: Milk (Gus Vant Sant, 2008)
Timely biopic, given the recently passing of Proposition 8 (against gay marriage) in California - one of the campaigns Harvey Milk ran was to prevent teachers being sacked simply because of their sexuality, and indeed the sacking of anyone who opposed the proposition.
There must be a gay narrative with a happy ending - it's a decade since I saw My Own Private Idaho but that's a rejection as I recall - but no one wants to tell it. This is a film of my current period of interest, although it didn't fetishise the seventies as much as it might have done, and of course it is that golden period between the Stonewall disturbances (there has to be a better word than riot) and the emergence of HIV. And yet Milk is - like Hanks's character in Philadelphia and Gyllenhaal's in Brokeback Mountain - a martyr. Got to do that gay gothic. For those who know not their history, the ending is telegraphed from the very start. We await the tragedy. Whilst Penn's performance is very impressive (and looks authentic compared to some archive footage), I wish there was less archness or camp. (James Franco as former lover Scott Smith pulls it off.)
This is a deliberately political movie about people forced into politics - a republican-leaning businessman wanting to live and work in the Castro, and to avoid being beaten up. It is the pink pound that brings acceptance, although it is a long struggle to get acceptance, and to get him elected as a member of the Board of Supervisors. It felt a little as if the mayor was won across a little too quickly - but perhaps it's no more complicated than him being a decent man. There are hints that their nemesis Dan White - in fiction would you have Milk and White as opposing characters? - is a bit of a closet case, and it is to Van Sant and Josh Brolin's crtedit that he is a three dimensional character rather than an ogre.
I'm not sure how this won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay - given it owes a debt to a documentary and a biography - but the rules of the Academy are always bizarre. There are moments when Van Sabt is a little indulgent - the telephone network montage echoing the porn cover montage from Idaho - and it's a shame he didn't include Anita Bryant in the what happened next captions.
I watch so you don't have to...
XXVI: Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008)
Adaptation of the Stephenie Meyer novel, which apparently has the message: girls, don't get a man too excited because he's going to eat you alive. Some men are hairy on the inside.
Inexplicably pale Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) returns to live with her police chief father (Billy Burke) in a small town in Oregon. She quickly learns the ins and outs of the cool kids, the jocks and the geeks in a remarkably multi-ethnic school - although only the white characters matter for the sake of the plot. (There's a black vampire, and a couple of Native Americans of minor significance, and a quibble I will mention in a moment, but it does seem a cynical casting process.) Above all, she is taken by the group of equally pale outsiders, the Cullens (although I kept mishearing this as the Cohens). In particular she is struck by Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), whose treat her mean policy is particularly effective at keeping her keen, and who sits next to stuffed owl at such an angle that it appears he has angel wings.
Pattinson, it has to be said, is a very striking actor - it's nice to see him giving James Van der Beek's forehead work, and whenever they get around to the remake of This Island Earth it will be very useful.
The Cullens are vampires, and something is going around brutally murdering people. For some reason this singles out Swan as a target.
The audience I saw it with were laughing all the way through - I suspect in a kind of Plan 9 kind of way. I fear it's dreadfully earnest - without the tongue in cheek air about the marvellous and teenaged angst that Buffy had, but I dare say it's probably about as feminist.
XXVII: Red Riding: 1980 (James Marsh, 2009)
Marsh just won the Oscar for Man on Wire, and is probably otherwise known for Wisconsin Death Trip. Here the action leaps a book (1977) from 1974 to the 1980s and the dying days of the search for the Yorkshire Ripper. Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is called into investigate the investigation in West Yorkshire, a few years after the abandonment of another enquiry. Hunter is convinced that the letters and tape of the Ripper are fake, and that one of the murders doesn't fit the pattern. He is warned off by the rest of the police, as it become increasingly apparent he is on the verge of discovering a conspiracy.
It's hard to say more without giving too much away - suffice it to say that Peace's characters seem compromised by their sexual desires, and inability to keep jobs and personal lives separate. It's perhaps hard to think that Considine can have had twenty years on the force (I'm four years older than him), but otherwise he is utterly convincing (although I could imagine Steven Rea playing the role). The supporting cast is fantastic and starry - Warren Clarke is Dalziel gone to the bad - and sufficiently well known that there's not the distraction of isn't-that-whatsit'sname-you-know-him-out-of-that-programme? The ending - well, downbeat like the first episode, but less convincing as a trick has been pulled on us.
I look forward - if that is the word - to seeing 1983 to see whether there is any consolation there.
Totals: 27 - Cinema: 8; DVD: 17; Television: 2
Timely biopic, given the recently passing of Proposition 8 (against gay marriage) in California - one of the campaigns Harvey Milk ran was to prevent teachers being sacked simply because of their sexuality, and indeed the sacking of anyone who opposed the proposition.
There must be a gay narrative with a happy ending - it's a decade since I saw My Own Private Idaho but that's a rejection as I recall - but no one wants to tell it. This is a film of my current period of interest, although it didn't fetishise the seventies as much as it might have done, and of course it is that golden period between the Stonewall disturbances (there has to be a better word than riot) and the emergence of HIV. And yet Milk is - like Hanks's character in Philadelphia and Gyllenhaal's in Brokeback Mountain - a martyr. Got to do that gay gothic. For those who know not their history, the ending is telegraphed from the very start. We await the tragedy. Whilst Penn's performance is very impressive (and looks authentic compared to some archive footage), I wish there was less archness or camp. (James Franco as former lover Scott Smith pulls it off.)
This is a deliberately political movie about people forced into politics - a republican-leaning businessman wanting to live and work in the Castro, and to avoid being beaten up. It is the pink pound that brings acceptance, although it is a long struggle to get acceptance, and to get him elected as a member of the Board of Supervisors. It felt a little as if the mayor was won across a little too quickly - but perhaps it's no more complicated than him being a decent man. There are hints that their nemesis Dan White - in fiction would you have Milk and White as opposing characters? - is a bit of a closet case, and it is to Van Sant and Josh Brolin's crtedit that he is a three dimensional character rather than an ogre.
I'm not sure how this won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay - given it owes a debt to a documentary and a biography - but the rules of the Academy are always bizarre. There are moments when Van Sabt is a little indulgent - the telephone network montage echoing the porn cover montage from Idaho - and it's a shame he didn't include Anita Bryant in the what happened next captions.
I watch so you don't have to...
XXVI: Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008)
Adaptation of the Stephenie Meyer novel, which apparently has the message: girls, don't get a man too excited because he's going to eat you alive. Some men are hairy on the inside.
Inexplicably pale Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) returns to live with her police chief father (Billy Burke) in a small town in Oregon. She quickly learns the ins and outs of the cool kids, the jocks and the geeks in a remarkably multi-ethnic school - although only the white characters matter for the sake of the plot. (There's a black vampire, and a couple of Native Americans of minor significance, and a quibble I will mention in a moment, but it does seem a cynical casting process.) Above all, she is taken by the group of equally pale outsiders, the Cullens (although I kept mishearing this as the Cohens). In particular she is struck by Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), whose treat her mean policy is particularly effective at keeping her keen, and who sits next to stuffed owl at such an angle that it appears he has angel wings.
Pattinson, it has to be said, is a very striking actor - it's nice to see him giving James Van der Beek's forehead work, and whenever they get around to the remake of This Island Earth it will be very useful.
The Cullens are vampires, and something is going around brutally murdering people. For some reason this singles out Swan as a target.
The audience I saw it with were laughing all the way through - I suspect in a kind of Plan 9 kind of way. I fear it's dreadfully earnest - without the tongue in cheek air about the marvellous and teenaged angst that Buffy had, but I dare say it's probably about as feminist.
XXVII: Red Riding: 1980 (James Marsh, 2009)
Marsh just won the Oscar for Man on Wire, and is probably otherwise known for Wisconsin Death Trip. Here the action leaps a book (1977) from 1974 to the 1980s and the dying days of the search for the Yorkshire Ripper. Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is called into investigate the investigation in West Yorkshire, a few years after the abandonment of another enquiry. Hunter is convinced that the letters and tape of the Ripper are fake, and that one of the murders doesn't fit the pattern. He is warned off by the rest of the police, as it become increasingly apparent he is on the verge of discovering a conspiracy.
It's hard to say more without giving too much away - suffice it to say that Peace's characters seem compromised by their sexual desires, and inability to keep jobs and personal lives separate. It's perhaps hard to think that Considine can have had twenty years on the force (I'm four years older than him), but otherwise he is utterly convincing (although I could imagine Steven Rea playing the role). The supporting cast is fantastic and starry - Warren Clarke is Dalziel gone to the bad - and sufficiently well known that there's not the distraction of isn't-that-whatsit'sname-you-know-him-out-of-that-programme? The ending - well, downbeat like the first episode, but less convincing as a trick has been pulled on us.
I look forward - if that is the word - to seeing 1983 to see whether there is any consolation there.
Totals: 27 - Cinema: 8; DVD: 17; Television: 2
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