Milk

Colleen Kenny's Thoughts:
I was anxious to see Milk the biopic of the first openly gay elected official in the U.S., Harvey Milk. Anxious because I knew it could be a great story and an important one for Americans today and also anxious because Gus Van Sant was directing it. This bit of information made me very nervous. Gus as a director does not have a good record, the film Elephant comes to mind among too many others. But thankfully Milk turned out to be his best film yet. (Well ahead of his second best Good Will Hunting).
Gus worried me in the beginning of the film with slow close ups of Franco and Penn in the sun making out but most of his "stylistic" type shots subsided soon after this.
The performances by Sean Penn as Harvey Milk and Josh Brolin as Dan White are definitely at least Dolphin nomination worthy in my opinion. Sean Penn gave his best performance and was extremely convincing and captivating in the role of Milk. James Franco and Emile Hirsch also gave commendable performances.
Civil liberties having such heavy meaning in my life definitely made the movie mean more to me and have added significance. Harvey Milk had a huge impact on the gay rights movement in the U.S.. I was talking with a gay friend of mine a couple of years ago and he told me about Harvey Milk and how Milk even in death strengthened the Gay movement by becoming a martyr for it. I think the film did an adequate job of portraying this; showing at the end the amount of people who came out to commemorate Milk with candles in the streets.
One review I read said that the film made Harvey Milk seem too flawless. I don't know enough of history to validate or refute this point, but I will say it's hard not to mythologize people who have done heroic things. Also, in my opinion the film was good about not making Milk seem like an Angel, after all he was in the closet and a conservative for most of his life.
In this Dolphin members opinion Milk was one of the best films of 2008. It had a great and important story and memorable performances by Penn and Brolin.

Drew Dahle's Thoughts:
As covered above Milk is Gus Van Sant's recent film about San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk. Van Sant (the auteur behind such travesties as Elephant, Last Days, My Own Private Idaho, 1998's shot for shot remake of Psycho and most recently Paranoid Park) doesn't fuck up the film too badly so kudos to him for that and surprisingly, the lead up to Milk's murder is really well done until Milk is actually killed in overwrought slow motion. What is really special about the film are the performances by Josh Brolin, James Franco and most importantly Sean Penn who gives the best performance of his career by a mile. Penn carries this film, and does so admirably. While not a carbon copy of Harvey Milk, he seems to embody his spirit and he definitely leaves all traces of Sean Penn behind, which is a rare occurrence. Franco and Penn have chemistry and create a tender portrait of a loving relationship even in spite of Van Sant's stupid out-of-focus eyeball closeups and the long slow motion shot spying on Penn and Franco making out, that is more absurd than affecting. Josh Brolin is also fantastic in his limited amount of screen time as Milk's assassin Dan White. Brolin could have easily played White simply as a monster, but instead portrays him as a man over is head, trying to find some control of his life or career and continuously failing. I confess, I sympathized with him until he committed the murders. Also, Brolin plays a drunk person the best I've seen anyone do.
Milk is a good film; I certainly enjoy it and it is important as the first good mainstream film about gay characters (maybe we can all forget about Brokeback Mountain now). My criticism of the film is that its quality rests solely on the shoulders of the three leads I mentioned (not Emile Hirsch or Diego Luna, who were terribly annoying, possibly by design) and the story of Harvey Milk himself. The script by Dustin Lance Black while doing a suitable job telling the story isn't spectacular in the least and occasionally inserts little unnecessary episodes that take me out of the film such as an unnamed teen who calls Milk twice during the movie. If a great director had been on this project I have few doubts that this would have been the film of the year but alas a great director was not. Instead it is a merely good film, despite a mess of flaws, featuring phenomenal performances by Penn and Brolin about an important and inspiring man. Unfortunately, though, this is not the singularly brilliant film that could have been made and that Harvey Milk probably deserves.