Rachel Getting Milked

Rachel Getting Married

Anne Hathaway is superb as Kym, the junkie who crashes her sister’s wedding and creates chaos all around her. Director Jonathan Demme’s digital camera is perfectly placed throughout the film and the supporting cast (especially Debra Winger) is perfectly fine. But if I want to sit through a couple hours of relentless family fighting and bickering, I’ll stay sober on Thanksgiving. The ridiculously liberal wedding is interesting, and I liked the way the film ended without any easy answers. I could criticize how thinly written the groom is, but recognize that this is a “sisters” movie. But I gotta say, and I know this is shallow, but couldn’t they find a guy without a tooth gap you could drive a truck through and Elton John glasses that cover his face and the faces of the people immediately to his right and left? It’s distracting and without any charisma or lines to speak, you’ll wonder what Rachel is doing with him. You’ll also wonder what the unbelievably noble black family would want anything to do with the crazy white family, with their junkie daughter and latent homosexual father. B

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Milk

Surely Harvey Milk had a tiny flaw at one point in his life. Surely he had bouts of anger or vengeance or left the toilet seat up or something. He’s treated way too reverently here and his adversaries like Anita Bryant are portrayed as evil incarnate. Dan White is written as an evil incompetent boob, but at least Josh Brolin gives him quite a bit of depth. Sean Penn gives a transformative performance as Milk. It’s no surprise that he won the Oscar for Best Mimicry by an Actor in a Lead Role (see also 2004-2006 and 2002-2003, 2005-2007 on the ladies’ side). Admittedly, there are a lot of great jokes and 1970s San Francisco is impeccably recreated. The slow motion stuff didn’t really work for me, but director Gus Van Sant did enough funky framing of the actors to keep it interesting, sometimes pulling way back to show the characters in their environment. But everyone’s treatment of Milk the man is so nauseatingly worshipful that this biopic ends up much more mundane than I thought possible – even with all the dudes kissing. Surely Harvey Milk had some kind of flaw. I mean more than using his fame and power to take advantage of a vulnerable, homeless, suicidal Latino 2 decades his junior. B