New Movie Review: Milk

There is no such thing as having too many civil rights heroes. I certainly had another in Milk, a movie that resonated with me deeply. I have spent my entire life dealing with powerful emotions based on the hatred and fear of homosexuality. I only wish I had known about him in middle school or before. I hope that teens watch this and the casual words of hatred towards people of different sexual orientation are not bandied about to establish a crude cameraderie amongst supposed equals.

There could be so many movies made about San Fran in this time period. It wasn't only Harvey's time, though he was a shining beacon of light. Some were controversial, such as the Black Panther Party. Others, such as Jim Jones with his People's Temple or the Symbionese Liberation Army, are regarded as blights of history with no apologists. All would make good movies. For a fun recasting of the SLA, don't miss the movie Network, a classic.

I'll have to watch Milk again, and I agree with what the Czech mentioned to me, that it's a movie you can watch again really soon. Some movies are great, but are nearly impossible to watch again (holocaust movies). This movie, though, succeeds in helping deepen Mr. Milk's place into the canon of American history, at none too critical a time.

Old Movie Review: Silence of the Lambs

Last night I watched this '91 Oscar winner for the second time, the first time being over 14 years ago. Back then, I was just plain scared. I wasn't a habitual watcher of horror movies. My first experience with a horror movie, Bug (1975, I watched a TV or VHS version in '84), left me absolutely terrified to put my body anywhere.

This, and a few other horror movies I probably shouldn't have seen, were due to my loving nanny at the time, an El Salvadorean in her 60's who had escaped the civil war. She loved horror movies. We speculated it was because of the real-life horror of being in a vicious war and also a huge earthquake, but perhaps she just needed suspense and bodycount to carry a storyline. Her English never got so good anyways, and this was long before Spanish cable was available nationwide. So, shows like Dallas didn't have enough going on to follow the story without understanding the conversations (not like she missed much).

This time around, I wasn't terribly afraid. I knew, for instance, that this movie (like the best of the suspense genre) traded a lot of outright gore and violence for suspense (reducing the 'cringe count'). Now that I could focus on other parts of the movie, I appreciated it for something wholly outside of suspense: Jodie Foster's acting around her character's gender role.

Jodie Foster is, as Hannibal Lecter pins her, a rube in cheap shoes dreaming to make it big in the FBI. She has an accent that she flips on when she needs to gain the trust of local police in rural or Southern areas. Likewise, she turns it off at the bureau's headquarters in Quantico. She's adapting because she's fighting an uphill battle: in the spheres of law enforcement and (yes) criminaldom, men are typically the enforcers and criminals and women are the victims. The men in the movie, whether nerdy Ph D's, G-Men, or lunatics, view her as a sexy catch or someone to fling semen on. The men who try something on her vastly outnumber the ones who don't: even Hannibal Lecter cops a 'pinky feel' as she grabs her case file back in Memphis. The movie isn't sexist; Demme's point is that this particular world (and the world at large by extension) is sexist. A criticism I would levy, though, is that it came off as a bit heavy-handed and not too subtle. I appreciate subtlety in art.

It was important for me to see this for another reason, as I had watched Manhunter this year, Michael Mann's original version that flopped at the box office. The difference lies in the directors. Demme is heavy-handed and obvious, while Mann uses his usual stoicism in guiding his monomaniacal male leads (with no big female protagonists, very typical Mann). Like all classic Mann (all Mann is classic), the men discuss the situations with extreme brevity and economy. Mann's Hannibal Lecter may be the exception, but he isn't given enough screen time to play tug-of-war with the detective lead like in Silence of the Lambs. And, unlike nearly all serial killer portrayals, Mann's killer on the loose actually has a sympathetic, human side. Michael Mann has guts--he's not afraid to lose audience in the romanesque gladiator simplicity of good and evil.

I am a Mann fan, though, and I make no bones about it. Is Manhunter superior to Silence of the Lambs? If you like Michael Mann, it's just an unfair fight, but yeah, it is superior.