Skip to main content

MILK Post One

I saw MILK two weeks ago. I knew MILK would be one of the few movies I saw in 2008. As the father of a two-and-a-half year old boy, my wife and I do not get out to the movies much. When the movie’s forthcoming started a buzz around the S.F. Bay Area, with Sean Penn (a Bay Area celeb) playing the once San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, I knew this one was necessary. And because of Milk himself.

MILK. It's important for now and future generations. I was a kid when he was shot. As someone from the east coast, I knew more about the “Twinkie defense” than Harvey Milk himself, somewhat and until now.

Sean Penn’s MILK was equally as much a compliment to Penn’s skills as an actor as the characterization was a testament to the fullness of being that Harvey Milk embodied. You got the sense there was enough Milk for Penn to climb up into and populate.

In the film, there could have been more about Milk’s philosophy, more about his love life or more about his abasement or spiritual transcendence. Penn’s portrayal was moving, human, sparse and complete to the very confines of the film. He filled the box. So too was the movie itself expansive and contained.

I can’t get The Little Mermaid off my mind, mainly, because with a two-and-a-half year old at home, it is often on.

The Little Mermaid is a simple story about a girl, a sea witch, an absent mother of four and a benevolent, bumbling patriarch who relies on a crab to rear and to admonish his daughters.

The movie follows one linear track, but all that it suggests of importance:

- Mother, daughter, father relations at a time of sexual awakening
- Issues of identity and assimilation
- Alterity
- And the truly remarkable degrees of invaginative (*) imagery in the Disney animation

are never dealt with directly, by choice.



(* - A stunningly evocative term introduced to me by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime that proposes a counter point to the phallic, “A space before it was a figure, whether or not the figure then becomes a reason for the space and thereby its retrospective origin."
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. New York, NY: Allworth Press, 1999. p. 64.)

O.K., I digress…I guess, I just had to get that off my chest.

But I was struck by the strategic, moving and thoughtful manner with which Gus Van Sant and his team chose to deal with certain subjects by omission, namely the AIDS epidemic that decimated the souls that populated MILK and only a few short years after the films historical culmination. (con't)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Go to A Conference Anyways?

@lidja @lyndakelly61 @futureofmuseums @creativemerc @museum_flavor pLz look http://tinyurl.com/qxlja4 &here http://bit.ly/q1mhV assoc./conf. grpthink @RichardMcCoy @DanielCull very import.

A Year-end Letter Update from James and Family

Dear Friends and Family, On the brink of the new year on December 31, 2019 we stood at the foot of Kehinde Wiley's brand new monumental equestrian sculpture in downtown Richmond at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. There were a bunch of families gathered around taking pictures together. Emblematic of this entire year and entitled “ Rumors of War ,” the monument depicts an unarmed Black man in heroic pose atop a horse. The man’s sneakers are in the stirrups, looking back over their shoulder like Napoleon as they ride forward up a ridge . It was a strange harbinger of the year that was, and how it’s going. Kamala Harris will be named our vice president in a few weeks. In between, the apocalyptic has been commonplace; I mean, what a year. Emil started high school this fall. Graduation this past spring from Mark Day School was likely the year’s highlight. Karen is still at Mark Day. This fall they've been doing hybrid learning. It’s the first time Karen and Emil have not been goi...

Review: King Henry VI, Part 2

King Henry VI, Part 2 by William Shakespeare My rating: 5 of 5 stars I have just now gotten to part 2 of the Henry VI plays. the first had amazing speeches and frickin' Joan of Arc and I thought it couldn't get any better. THAN this one's got conjurors who evoke prophetic specters, multiple beheadings, and a mad rebel named Cade who just starts to try to take over the whole country, no Empire for like no good reason then gets killed after hiding ten days without food in a hedgegrove. The language is extraordinary from the get go where pious Henry says, "O Lord, that lends me life, Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness!" I am going to make that my motto! View all my reviews