Sean Penn in Gus Van Sant's Harvey "Milk" pic

this film is gonna rock.

meh. I hate Sean Penn.

whatevs, BALLwasher

gus van sand - classic.
late sean penn - dud.

"milk" - who knows

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH

zeno otm

isn't all sean penn other than 'fast times' essentially 'late' sean penn?

for stoners, sure

A process loooooong in germination. Robin Williams was discussed in '92.

My wife is still wrangling to get a role as either lesbian protester #43 or Harvey's fag hag #11. She's got her outfit all picked out and everything.

so van sant has abondond the abstract form in favour of an obv. political drama?

thank fucking god.

'the abstract form' whuuuut? u mean boring alan clarke/bela tarr knock-offs.

Ten years from now he will do a shot-by-shot remake starring Zac Efron.

i disagree, xpost

anyway, he didnt do anything good except "will hunting" and "idaho" before that period imo.
so i hope it's a "new",surprising phase and not a "returning back" phase,which might be a failure.
but who knows.

btw,van sant is also a part of this movie "8", which feature 8 directors, with 8 segmants.
(another director on the project is,guuess who,sean penn!)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493101/fullcredits#directors

Zeno, u high. Drugstore Cowboy, Mala Noche and To Die For are all great. Cowgirls and the Psycho reshoot are his only real fuckups.

drugstore is just ok, the other 2 i didnt see.
cowgirls and psycho are fuckups indeed

"elephant" and "last days" on the otehr hand, are outstanding.
i wanna see "paranoid park"

Yeah, I haven't seen Paranoid Park, either. Am curious.

But you really oughtta check out Mala Noche. At least as good as anything else he's done. Criterion just put out a nice version.

i'll check it

"drugstore is just ok"

Crazy. He's never done anything half as good since.

Elephant is garbage. Didn't even bother with the Cobain nonsense.

to die for

there's nothing 'abstract' about his boring guilt-driven post-'finding forester' work.

way to predictably regurgitate the general Van Sant thread, guys

way to predictably regurgitate on it, Morbs

hold your lunch, fellas. sheesh!

in every fucking film thread ever...

lol

there isn't much else to discuss yet to be fair.

let's discuss milk.

I'm more curious what this film will have to say about Dan White than Harvey Milk actually.

well, Harris Savides is lensing it, so it should look good.

oh, and Victor Garber is playing Moscone.

geez I'd forgotten HS was also the DP on Zodiac

has anyone seen that harvey milk documentary from the 80s? that's supposed to be good.

savides loves his SF

I've seen it about a million times. It is good.

It also mostly avoids the mistake of making White out to be some sort of monster which it deserves credit for.

http://www.sfweekly.com/2008-01-30/news/white-in-milk/

Yeah I saw that. Welcome to Munich II (aka I'm not going to let facts get in the way of the moral I want to superimpose on these events.)

Precisely.

Man, reading that I just had a flashback to being a little kid in the Sierras when the news came through about the murders, which was only about a week after Jonestown, and being seriously intimidated by SF.

sean penn so crazy

I've never seen the (entire) Milk docufilm nor have I read any book-length bios, so I'll have to get back to you re Dan White.

If Jean-Pierre Melville had lived to make Munich, we'd all have gotten a good nap out of it.

I suppose the good laugh we got is better then.

I seem to recall accusations that Fincher's DV cop show deviated from some agreed-upon facts.

Yeah, apparently the bus lane on Geary St didn't exist in 1970. I was shocked too.

Milk's career also set the horror that is her hair in motion too.

Are you implying they used the same hairdresser?

Duh, that Milk was her hairdresser.

I thought so.

but who's been buffing that helmet the last 30 years?

As Oscar voting is taking place right now, won't Milk be further hurt by the dampened post-election Savior vibe?

loved loved loved this film.

none of the criticisms here really make any sense to me -- i thought there was just the right balance of politics and personal life, and penn was great. i can't remember the last best picture nominee i thought was this good.

Hilton Als' mixed review in the NY Review of Books.

good movie!!!!!

ehh its ok, pretty watchable, stirring at times, everyone in it is good but such a biopic in some ways (the kid who calls him, the last poignant phone calls that resolve all the relationships the night before he dies... pretty lame script imo)

ya but the screenwriter was pretty cute so

I saw this the other day. I dunno if it was because the two movies I saw before it were Notorious (urgh but at least lol) and Watchmen (urgh i want to kill myself and there is still like 4 hours left) but I just fell in love with this movie; even cried at the end.

I liked Denis O'Hare.

i never understood this automatic "groan biopic" reaction a lot of ppl have, really.

Yeah -- nobody said "groan, Western" in 1959.

people were making better westerns in 1959 than they are biopics now

and actually, im sure there were a lot of people who didn't like westerns back then. to me this is not a genre i enjoy. i find they are almost always way too on the nose and the stories, by fact of being based on real events, are rarely satisfying.

Right -- the point is they are exceptions in genres we don't care about, and this is one.

ya and i liked it except for the hamhanded stuff it had to do to make its plot work - which all biopics kind of have to do

i find a lot of biopics enjoyable but since they tend to bounce around from highlight to lowlight and back it's not especially interesting as a genre. stories based on real events or a real period without a singular strong focus or "biopic" style thing are stories that work better for me. (goodfellas, for one!)

also: the right stuff

my problem with biopics is usually structure and pacing. most of them just feel kind of even, and "and then what happened was..." for two hours.

The Right Stuff isn't remotely a biopic, it's the history of a mythology.

except for the hamhanded stuff it had to do to make its plot work

Regular folks call this "entertainment." Did you see the grosses of I'm Not There?

s1ocki, I believe the Shilts book had all those phone calls (incl from kid in wheelchair), they were factual.

i never said it was a biopic, doc

ya i know

Regular folks call this "entertainment." Did you see the grosses of I'm Not There?

s1ocki, I believe the Shilts book had all those phone calls (incl from kid in wheelchair), they were factual.

― Dr Morbius, Wednesday, April 1, 2009 2:46 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

since when do you rep for the masses morbs?

i know the calls were real but those scenes felt like a lifetime movie

i'm just saying the structure of a big-studio film (that isn't a poptasia by Todd Haynes) about a man's life is going to adhere to a certain template; Van Sant's was fresher than I expected.

ya it's just the tension when the shapelessness of a real life is bent to fit a traditional hollywood dramatic structure that often feels kinda strained to me.

at least they didnt add a dead brother

it was so pretty tho! and everyone dressed so well!

1) San Francisco + Harris Savides
2) gays

s1ocki, Milk's life was kinda dramatic in a three-act way.

whoops
http://www.thesword.com/index.php/celebritynipple/2798-hardcore-gay-fuck-shots-of-oscar-winner-dustin-lance-black.html

nsfw obv

hardcore gay fuck shots

he's already issued an apology for having unprotected sex I guess

kind of attractive in a gay clone way, which is to say, doesn't do it for me

lol hardcore gay fuck shots

saw these the other day. co-sign with elmo.

the statement DLB released doesn't make clear whether the unprotected sex pictured was actually truly unsafe -- he just says that the message the images send is "misleading." i mean, it could be the case that they were taken in the context of a monogamous long-term relationship which later went south, in which case i wouldn't want to be party to some ex-lover's campaign of defamation of dude.

Gus Van Sant's Fuckshot

i think he's pretty cute tbh

moreso w/out clothes

can i just say that i wld wear all fames francos clothes in this pretty much

uh james franco

Watched this last night and thought it was pretty good. Penn was excellent and I love Franco in pretty much anything. I cried at the end too a hoy a hoy.

am pretty selective abt when i love franco, this n f&g really just

im trying to clear up my harddrive so im watching all the movies that have been clogging it up to delete them. I re-watched this tonight.

Didn't remember it being so teal and orange but i guess that's what the teal and orange thing is, its only annoying once you notice it. I remember this movie being more attractive than it seemed. Weird that the crazy trite elements of the screenplay werent dumped a bit more, i mean the it gets better kid in the wheelchair was like a very special episode of boy meets world or something. But yeah theres this weird collision of van sant the populist and van sant the experimentalist in a way that doesnt really happen in his other movies. Little gimmicks like the shutter-pausing archive footage and the hockney ref seems a bit playful for such an obvious white elephant canon style movie.

Idk tho, im not normally a sucker for big formula-driven biopic things but I liked how they didnt separate out the nobleness of *the cause* from like bathhouses and tight jeans. it stays kindof attractive and sexy despite the "historical weight" partic at the moment of its prop eight issue pic. release date. idk moreso it made me feel connected to larger narratives which is a nice thing. james franco is majorly hot in it and more and more i gen think of him as a bit of a ratface.

it is kindof baffling how all these dudes wanna bang sean penn in it tho, they should have explained that

power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, i hear

ask me about this movie, and one of the first things i picture is alison pill's hair

jaymc how many movies are you watching this evening

also yes for sure

this movie was impossible to hate but also... not very good or memorable? the opening newsreel footage was the best thing in it.

xp
Saw this quite a while ago and the residue of the movie in my memory is that it was good, but unexceptional, follows the biopic conventions pretty faithfully, and made Milk seem very likeable. The ending, of course, I knew going in, so it was not a major impression.