Milk

Finally got to the movies this weekend after a long stretch. I heard Milk was supposed to be awesome. It's not. Good acting, pretty awesome cross cutting between real and archive footage - maybe the best I've ever seen (did 24hr Party People cut back and forth?) - but lackluster writing and story telling.

The biopic is the lowest movie genre. An argument can be made for torture porn, although I consider that a subgenre of horror, which is also low genre, but not as low as the biopic. Biopics are almost never pleasurable. Citizen Kane's bloated reputation holds up this genre - whose stories inevitably crack at the seems in the 3rd act. Good biopics are the exception and I suspect these movies are made because filmmakers/audiences hold their subjects in such high regard, they think their reputations deserve the glorification a movie can provide.

Milk doesn't make it until the 3rd act. It's a bore from the get-go salvaged only by good scene work and acting...like watching a football game when the outcome is no longer in question, and the only pleasure can be derived from good individual plays.

And now onto what all my readers were waiting for: my latent homophobia. Okay, so Milk has a bunch of gay kissing and some sex. I find this aesthetically unpleasing to watch. Does this make me a homophobe? Maybe. But what am I supposed to do? Pretend I enjoy it? Not talk about? In my defense, and to prove I'm only half a homophobe, I have no similar problem with watching two ladies kiss/make out and have sex. To paraphrase Elaine from Seinfeld "The male body is ugly and utilitarian, the female body is work of art." I think she is right.

But the aesthetic question of ugly old men making out with each other is not what makes Milk not worth the $11.50 admission. After all, Brokeback Mountain had much more explicit gay sex and it was the best film of 2007. Milk's story is scattered and lacking drive and tension. It felt like watching an essay on the man and his impact on the gay rights movement - of which I'm not the biggest fan - with their aggressive, no-holds barred attitude, and overall contempt for any suggestion of a more moderate and less in-your-face approach.