film begins when Milk and his lover settled from New York to San Francisco with the gay migration of the 1970s until he was killed less than a year after taking office. The struggle for gay rights. Like Milk himself, the film is real, simple, down to earth, with excitement shining in the calm, and sweetness in the calm. The entire film was shot on old-fashioned film, just like documentaries from the seventies. In the words of a friend who went with me: "The real situation of the year was like this."
The first point of the film is the biographies of real people. Milk's own experience is already more legendary and shocking than most of the stories that have been made up. Once again, life is more dramatic and unpredictable than movies. The most important thing about recreating such a character on the screen is to keep it as it is, and to minimize the desire of the director himself to participate. SHOW, NOT TELL. Gus Vincent did it.
Gus Vincent is one of my more respected directors. With his talent, he can totally make this movie more fancy and cool in terms of photography. This can be seen from his excellent work "The Elephant". How much eye-catching material did the Custer District in San Francisco in the 1970s provide to satisfy a curious audience. But Vincent is a smart guy. In the film, Milk cut his long hair and changed his leggings for the campaign. His hair was neatly combed by conservatives at the time, and his clothes were simply pulled out of an insurance salesman's closet. Vincent did the same thing. In "The Elephant", there are no long-range stream-of-consciousness shots with hand-cranked long shots and modern composition, and what remains are honest, well-established characters and stories.
The second point to watch is, of course, Xiang Pan. Xiang Pan is the best American actor in his age group. His performance here is indeed Oscar-quality. He was Hollywood's famous "bad boy" with a temper bigger than a powder keg, regularly beating up journalists and men who dared to have any physical contact (including shaking hands) with his then-wife Madonna. He and Madonna loved and hated to death. In the end, Madonna couldn't stand his jealousy and beatings, and the two divorced. Even so, when Sister Mai, who is stronger than a man, was asked who her favorite man was, she was still intoxicated as if she had taken ecstasy: "Xiang Pan, Xiang Pan." No other man can compare to him . I gossip so much here, just to let you imagine, such a irascible man, facing the person he likes in the film, the expression on his face is as sweet, excited, and shy as a middle school student in love. He and his lover were as docile and content as a kitten when they had a long kiss on the streets of Custer. As a political man, he was speech and demagoguery. But he's not a man with a feminine demeanor. In both of his relationships in the film, he is attentive but emotionally dominant. Pan has no simple caricature of homosexuality in popular perception. Regardless of his sexuality, he was a man first and foremost, and a strong, assertive, philosophical man. Only in the moments of his speech and electoral excitement, the subtle tone and posture of the debate, the gait of the stairs, you can feel that this is not an ordinary man in these clues.
If I had to choose the best film of the year, I would choose The Reader. However, the political topics involved in "The Reader" are even more sensitive than "Lust and Caution", and its failure is not at all suspenseful. If I had to choose between Slumdog Millionaire and Milk, it would be a tough question. The former cannot compare with the latter in the seriousness of the subject matter, but the artistry and entertainment of the former are outstanding. And I never regard seriousness as an important index for judging a movie. It is an index, but no more important than any other index. Slumdog Millionaire gives depressed and homeless Americans yet another American dream, coming just in time and as lucky as the protagonist in the movie. It seems that luck is also an index for judging movies, and perhaps an important index.
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