If I was the sort of person who uses postage stamps even occasionally, I would own a book of Harvey Milk stamps. Definitely. The Times of Harvey Milk made me a lifelong admirer of the late San Francisco supervisor. I’ve watched it a good six or seven times at least. In any case I’m appalled by current attempts by the American Family Association to persuade the USPS to discontinue selling the stamp by goading anti-gay bigots into refusing to accept mail with the Harvey stamp (or something like that). The AFA is a right-wing hate group — the same kind of people who were behind the 1978 Briggs initiative, which sought to keep gay people from teaching at schools, and which Milk campaigned against and helped to defeat.

I’ve been otherwise engaged (which is sometimes a euphemism for “lazy”) but let’s get down to this, link-wise: (a) Stephen Zeitchik‘s 10.28 Hollywood Reporter piece about the alleged “Milk marketing conundrum” (which broke late yesterday evening as I was on my way out of the Milk screening and on my way to the Frost/Nixon one); (b) the angry response from Focus Features honcho James Schamus; and (c) a comment from Nathan Lee that echoes back into what Devin Faraci has raised today.

This trailer for Gus Van Sant‘s Milk looks awfully good. Just a trailer, but it looks right, feels right, and is very nimbly cut. Sean Penn‘s Harvey Milk performance feels like a knockout. (If only he were taller! Sorry, but it’s hard to dislodge the Times of Harvey Milk footage of the real McCoy, who was something like 6’3″ and had really big feet.) This is definitely the Gus of Good Will Hunting and Drugstore Cowboy…but please, not Finding Forrester!

The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez “just got an interesting tip” from a friend who got an early look at Gus Van Sant‘s Milk (Focus, 11.26). But I don’t know why he’d call it interesting since the guy doesn’t say if the biopic was any good or not.

All the tipster said is that (a) it’s much more “old school” Van Sant in the vein of the assured and economical days of Good Will Hunting or Drugstore Cowboy, rather than his recent experimental phase (Elephant, Last Days, etc.); (b) the editing was fantastic; (c) the use of old, archival footage rather seamless and adroit and (e) that the film “pops” with vibrant color.
That’s it? Earth to tipster: Did you like it? Is it well made? How good is Sean Penn? How did it make you feel? Does it…you know, deliver anything close to the emotional impact of The Times of Harvey Milk? Who are the standouts supporting players? Is it a derby movie?
Milk is about gay super-martyr Harvey Milk (Penn) — the first openly gay man elected to office (i.e., San Francisco city supervisor) in U.S. history, but who was later killed by a disturbed ex-supervisor named Dan White (Josh Brolin) who also shot SF mayor George Moscone on the same day.
James Franco and Diego Luna costar.

Though Walt Becker didn’t write Wild Hogs, its early progress is similarly angled, with much ‘ewww!’ mileage eked from the ways in which William H. Macy‘s sensitive-guy nature sometimes make him seem ‘gay,’ plus a randy cop (Scrubs‘ John C. McGinley) who misreads the traveling male quartet’s bond. Studio product once ridiculed homosexuals outright — now it goes the more insidious route of milking the straight characters’ ‘hilarious’ revulsion whenever they come in contact with or are mistaken for gay people.” — from Dennis Harvey‘s 2.24 Variety review.

As I didn’t care for Christophe Honore‘s Sorry Angel, I slipped out of the theatre after…oh, 85 minutes or so. Life is short.

Sorry Angel is actually a well-written, better-than-decent period drama (early ’90s) about a couple of gay guys separated by age and education levels, but influencing each other for the better in various open-ended, whatever-the-fuck ways. It’s not a terrible thing to sit through, but it kind of meanders along without a great deal happening. Then I began to realize that nothing actually would happen. I began to exhale audibly and glance at my watch around the 45-minute mark.

The main protagonist is Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps), an HIV-positive writer in his late 30s, living with a young son. The romantic interest is Arthur (Vincent LaCoste), a 22 year-old bisexual lightweight. They both struck me as relentlessly self-obsessed, thinking about their schtufenhaufers above everything else, and given to blah-blahing about whatever comes into their heads. Plus they’re pathetically addicted to cigarettes. I started out merely disliking these guys, but I soon graduated into despising and then hating the ground they stood on.

A friend who attended my 7 pm screening has just written that “Sorry Angel had no reason whatsoever to be 132 minutes long.”

There’s a stand-out scene in which a dying gay guy with Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions gets into a bathtub with Jacques. (He resists the idea at first but Jacques pulls him in.) They talk things over in a murmuring, open-hearted fashion, like old marrieds. I respect the inherent sadness and emotional candor and whatnot, and I doubt if I’ll ever forget this scene. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel…uhm, uneasy? Does this make me an asshole?

And the cigarettes! There isn’t a single scene in Sorry Angel in which someone doesn’t light up. Jesus H. Christ, can you give those stinkweeds a rest? The smoking in this movie smokes is so relentless I felt I was getting early-stage cancer from just watching this.

On top of which I prefer modestly-behaved, straight-friendly gay films like Call Me By Your Name, Moonlight, Brokeback Mountain and The Times of Harvey Milk. Oh, I’m sorry — does that make me sound like a heterosexual straight-washer? If you want to call me that, fine, but I’m not a big fan of sticky, cummy, in-your-face sexual behavior a la Sorry Angel, 120 Beats per Minute, John Cameron Mitchell‘s Shortbus, Taxi Zum Klo and so on. I prefer films that hold back on that stuff. Sorry, p.c. brownshirts, but I’m allowed to have this opinion.

Roughly four years ago I posted a little riff about Crayton Robey‘s Making The Boys, a longish but absorbing history of the impact of Mart Cowley‘s The Boys in the Band. It focused on Crowley’s life, the writing of the 1968 play and the huge off-Broadway success it became, the making of the William Freidkin-directed 1970 feature, and how Crowley’s life went afterwards. It reminded me of what a singular accomplishment Boys was in its day, and that the play, at least, really was a kind of gay earthquake…before anyone called anyone “gay.” I know I’m not supposed to admire the Friedkin today but it’s always been amusing and well-written, and each character is tart, particular and dimensional. I’m sorry but it’s a first-rate piece.

There was at least a little oxygen left in the room after the Robey doc. It created a little bit of a stir, and it persuaded me to re-sample the Friedkin film. I figured a Bluray would pop soon after and that would be that. But it never appeared.

Now, after four years, KI Studio Classics is issuing a Bluray on 6.16.15. The once-controversial film has been available on DVD but not as a streaming Amazon rental.

I was surprised by the results of a 3.24 poll, published by Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams, revealing his readers’ favorite gay-themed films. It’s a respectable list, but the absence of William Friedkin and Mart Crowley‘s The Boys in the Band (’70) — arguably the most groundbreaking-in-its-time gay film ever made — tells me Adams’ voters weren’t interested in films that weren’t about them, or which failed to provide comfortable and/or stirring self-images.

It’s common knowledge, of course, that the gay community turned its back on The Boys in the Band almost immediately after it opened in March 1970. That was nine months after the June 1969 Stonewall rebellion, and the sea-change in gay consciousness and values that happened in its wake — pride, solidarity, political militancy — had no room for a satiric and rather acidic drama about a group of Manhattan gay guys, gathered at a friend’s birthday party in the West Village, grappling with various forms of frustration, misery and self-loathing due to their sexuality.

Mart Crowley‘s revolutionary stage play, which opened off Broadway in April 1968, was a culmination of decades of frustration with straight society’s suppression and/or intolerance of gays mixed with the up-the-establishment freedoms of the late ’60s, but the film didn’t fit the post-Stonewall mold. Obviously. And it hasn’t aged well at all.

When Boys was re-released in San Francisco 12 years ago, Chronicle critic Edward Guthmann wrote that “by the time Boys was released in 1970…it had already earned among gays the stain of Uncle Tomism…[it’s] a genuine period piece but one that still has the power to sting. In one sense it’s aged surprisingly little — the language and physical gestures of camp are largely the same — but in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that’s a good thing.”

But Boys deserves respect as a revolutionary play of its time, and, as a film, as a kind of landmark presentation for its candid, amusing, sad and occasionally startling presentations of urban gay men and their lifestyles during those psychedelic downswirl, end-of-the-Johnnson-era, dawn-of-the Nixon-era days, made all the more entertaining and memorable by several bottled-lightning performances (particularly Cliff Gorman‘s).

And it’s just not right on some level that gays (whom I’m presuming represent most of Adams’ respondents) haven’t included Boys on their list at all…not even down near the bottom, for Chrissake. That’s uncaring, disrespectful, short-sighted, shallow.

I guess I’m extra-mindful of Crowley’s play/film because a couple of months ago I saw Crayton Robey‘s Making The Boys, a longish but mostly absorbing account of (a) Crowley’s life, (b) the writing of the play and (c) the making of the film. It reminded me of what a singular accomplishment Boys was in its day, and that the play, at least, really was a kind of gay earthquake…before anyone called anyone else “gay.”

My favorite gay-themed (partially or completely) films, in this order:

(1) Brokeback Mountain, (2) The Times of Harvey Milk, (3) Angels in America, (4) The Opposite of Sex, (5) Prick Up Your Ears, (6) A Single Man, (7) Gods and Monsters, (8) The Kids Are All Right, (9) Milk, (19) Longtime Companion, (11) Kiss of the Spider Woman, (12) The Boys in the Band, (13) Priest, (14) Maurice, (15) The Hours and Times, (16) The Crying Game and (17) Philadelphia.

Jane Fonda tweeted yesterday about the shooting of Rep. Giffords. This led me to her site and this 32 year-old photo of herself and Harvey Milk, another elected official shot by a right-leaning delusional, but who sadly wasn’t as lucky as Giffords, who will most likely survive according to reports. And that whole episode just flooded back in. A Criterion Bluray/DVD of Rob Epstein‘s The Times of Harvey Milk, easily the saddest, most emotionally moving doc I’ve ever seen, is out on 3.22.

Marshall Fine admires Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Howl (Oscilloscope, 9.24) , which “is about many more things than just a poem,” he writes. “But if you boil it down to its essence, it’s a movie about a poet and his creation – about the writing and transmission of a work of poetry. And unlike last year’s overrated Bright Star, this one is actually interesting.

“Howl was originally meant to be a documentary. But the writer-directors (who also did The Times of Harvey Milk and The Celluloid Closet) decided instead to create an impressionistic movie about a transcendent and transitional moment in popular culture: the writing and publication of Allen Ginsberg‘s ‘Howl,” a landmark 1956 epic poem that begins with ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’

“While I admired and enjoyed this film, I will also honestly say that it’s not an audience movie. It is impressionistic and hallucinatory, dealing with obscure figures out of literary history – obscure, at least, to anyone who is not a fan of or acquainted with the Beat movement of the 1950s.”

May I interject a thought at this juncture? Howl is an audience movie — it’s very intriguing and friendly and enlightening every step of the way — as long as the audience is not composed of popcorn-muching morons with shaved heads who wear gold chains and cutoffs and basketball sneakers with thick white athletic socks.

Here’s what I said in a 1.21.10 piece filed during the Sundance Film Festival:

Howl is “an indie, artsy, half-animated dream-cream movie that’s basically an instructional primer for the uninitiated about what a wonderfully seminal and influential poem Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was and is.

“It’s brisk, condensed, in some ways florid, engaging, intellectually alert and stimulating. You know what this thing is? It’s a gay Richard Linklater movie, only deeper and more trippy. It’s an half-animated exploration thing that contains scenes of actors reading and ‘being,’ but in no way is this a movie that plays like a movie. It’s something else, and that’s a good thing for me.

“Howl is a ‘small’ film, but it’s rather wonderful and joyful in the particulars.

“Howl is not a narrative feature — it’s a near-documentary that says ‘stop what you’re doing and consider what a cool poem ‘Howl’ was…in fact, let us take you through the whole thing and show and tell you how cool and illuminating it is.” It uses Waltz With Bashir-like animation to illuminate what ‘Howl’ was in Ginsberg’s head when he wrote it, and what the poem’s more sensitive readers might have seen in their heads when they first read it.

“James Franco plays Ginsberg quite fully, particularly and well — he gets the slurring speech patterns and pours a mean cup of tea as he’s explaining a point to a journalist — but Franco, good as he is, is subordinate to (or should I say in harmony with?) the basic ambition of the film, which is to inform, instruct, awaken, turn on.

“For me, Ian McKellen‘s ‘Acting Shakespeare’ was a somewhat similar experience. An accomplished British actor explaining and double-defining the joy and transcendent pleasure of performing, feeling and really knowing deep down what Shakespeare’s poetry really means, and has meant to him all his life.”

FilmBuff, a video-on-demand channel for connoisseurs of high-quality, indie-level cinema as well as classics from all studios and realms, began to appear today on a couple of dozen cable systems, including Verizon’s FiOS and Charter. Cinetic Rights Management’s John Sloss and Matt Dentler, who told me about their new operation earlier today, said FilmBuff would be available on all the cable systems within two months time (i.e., by mid September).

Half of the films shown will be brand-new, unseen features or newish features that haven’t received the theatrical exposure their backers or fans felt was appropriate or deserved. The other half will be unseen gems from the not-too-distant past that have either been unreleased or hard to find on DVD. The films would be available for limited periods of three months or thereabouts.

“We’re excited about bringing more films to audiences around the country, both on broadband VOD and now cable VOD,” said Dentler, Cinetic’s head of programming “There’s a disconnect between movie audiences and quality films, both new and old. We’re trying to end that today.”

As one of the biggest sales-agent players in the indiewood scene, Cinetic is obviously in a good position to snag a wide array of films in both categories from various distributors and rights holders. Sloss and Dentler have relationships with everyone. And there isn’t a lot of competition right now in the VOD indie field except for IFilm and Magnolia, and they’re pushing their own product as opposed to Film Buff’s across-the-board offerings.

At present each download would cost the FilmBuff subscriber roughly $3.99 to $6.99, depending on the particulars of each title and deal. No flat monthly subscriber fees or discounted fees for subscribers are being contemplated for now.

My ears naturally perked up when I heard about FilmBuff making oldies-but-goldies available. This would mean possible deals to show all the older films I’d like to see but can’t due to various titles being unloved or unwanted by their rights holders.

John Sloss

Like Ken Russell‘s The Devils, for example, or James Bridges‘ Mike’s Murder. Or Mike Nichols‘ The Fortune, Jack Webb‘s -30-, David Jones‘ Betrayal, Frank Perry‘s Play It As It Lays, John Flynn‘s The Outfit, Paul Mazursky‘s Alex in Wonderland, Robert Aldrich‘s The Legend of Lylah Clare, Robert Altman‘s That Cold Day in the Park, Mark Rydell ‘s The Fox and Carol Reed‘s Outcast of the Islands. And that’s just for starters.

Current titles in the launch package are Richard Linklater‘s classic Slacker and Rob Epstein‘s The Times of Harvey Milk, as well as new films like Michael Almereyda‘s New Orleans Mon Amour (starring Christopher Eccleston and Elisabeth) and the Tribeca 2008 hit comedy The Auteur.

FilmBuff is part of Cinetic Rights Management (CRM), which is an arm of Cinetic Media. Whereas Cinetic Media is a sales agent for traditional media, CRM is a VOD distributor, and a separate company with different staffing.

I’ll have more information about FilmBuff as the days and weeks progress, but this seems like something I’d definitely want to have as a viewing option.

“A question has been nagging me for a while and recently intensified upon seeing Frost/Nixon,” writes a reader named Mat (one “t” — not a typo). “Why are Hollywood biographies so vapid? Every one i see is ‘just line ’em up and knock ’em down,’ straight facts, predictable arc. it leaves each film at the mercy of how interesting the given subject is, but rarely captures the essence of said subject.

“I’m thinking specifically of Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan doc of a few years ago (i.e., No Direction Home), which brought such a vivid feel to the man’s life and experiences instead of just telling the reader what happened in his life. An interesting life is one thing, but what makes the subject unique is what I’m after, and nothing ever seems to capture that. Or am i simply asking for too much?

“Frost/Nixon is a good movie because it’s an interesting story, but i felt no closeness to it. This happens over and over again and now, as I prepare to see Milk — a movie i want to like — I fear another by-the-numbers only-as-good-as-the-subject biopic coming at me. Is it strange to ask for more than just a vivid recreation, or are we shortchanging these stories by accepting that there is nothing more? Can you suggest any films for me which transcend the genre to get more of what i’m thinking of?”

Wells to Mat: Frost/Nixon isn’t a biopic — it’s a compressed situational drama about a specific chapter in the life of Richard Nixon. Milk is absorbing as ar as it goes, but if you want to really bask in the light of what made Harvey Milk exceptional, you need to see Rob Epstein‘s The Times of Harvey Milk. My favorite biopics with exceptional and particular flavorings: Viva Zapata, Patton, Raging Bull, Sergeant York, Lawrence of Arabia, Lust for Life. These are the ones that come to mind, at least.