Well, Christmas is here! I'm very excited. I had a perfect Thanksgiving with my good friend, Craig Fox. No plans were made in advance. I highly recommend making no plans for holidays, it ALWAYS works for me! Wake up with no expectation or agenda, just go with the day! So, I woke up, was getting ready for a movie and Craig called and so we met in San Diego, had a lovely turkey dinner at City Deli then went to see Milk. Sean Penn will surely get another well-deserved Oscar. Milk is a very powerful film about civil rights and politics; the timing of it's release couldn't be better. I cried throughout much of it, yet at the end I felt I had absorbed it all. I feel no need to rush back. I loved it. Every moment. Comparisons with Brokeback seem inevitable. It was the first movie I thought of while leaving Milk. They are connected, no doubt. Cousins, maybe. Harvey Milk's pride and optimism is a fascinating counterpoint to Ennis Del Mar's repression. Gus Van Sant does an incredible job but try as he does he never achieves the poetry of Brokeback. Milk is just a very well-made film, an absolutely rare thing these days, for sure, and I hate to be a Grinch but I'll never forget the experience of seeing Brokeback and running back in to the theatre, seeing it over 10 times, struggling with it, never understanding it fully. Then watching it lose the Oscar to Crash. Ugh. Flash forward to Milk. The films are linked in my mind and Brokeback makes Milk feel like a lesser film. Milk is about a HUGE movement and Brokeback is about a quiet relationship and yet Brokeback seems like a massive masterpiece and Milk is just a really, really good film. Maybe it does Milk a disservice to compare them but for me, they are unquestionably connected.
Anyway, from what I've seen this year, Sean Penn should win best Actor and Heath Ledger should win Best Supporting Actor. The linkage continues.
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