December 26, 2008

Milk

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MILK….Matt Yglesias explains why he didn’t like Milk as much as he expected to:

My first instinct was to say that the problem with the film is that the pacing is odd, but I think the problem may actually be that on some level Harvey Milk’s story isn’t that interesting.

This is an underappreciated phenomenon. When it comes to fiction, everyone understands that an uninteresting story is a death knell. But when it comes to stories based on real people, filmmakers too often seem to think that just because a person has done something of note, it means that this person’s life story is inherently interesting. But it’s not. Harvey Milk did worthwhile things and his life ended in a dramatic way, but his life story is actually fairly ordinary. The same can be said for the subjects of a disturbingly large number of biopics.

Which isn’t to say that Milk is bad. I didn’t think it lived up to its hype, but it was still pretty good. And Sean Penn did a phenomenal job in the title role. The film might be worth seeing just for that.

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