I drove up to San Francisco to see Milk with my nifty friend Sarah Dopp. I figured the right thing to do was to see it at the Castro Theatre, right where the story unfolded in the Seventies. It was something else to sit in the theatre and see the surrounding neighborhood on film.
The theatre was pretty full, and instead of advertising, we got photos of local gay and political life back in the Sixties and Seventies, including pictures of Harvey Milk and Dan White and George Moscone.
As far as the movie goes, I am nowhere near as eloquent as Rogert Ebert, so I'll let him tell you why it gets four stars.
PS: And I'm nowhere near as eloquent as Dervala. She says exactly what I felt:
The film opened with real footage of men being pulled out of New York bars and loaded into police wagons. They were homosexuals, and therefore criminals and psychiatric cases, and they covered their own faces as if they agreed with those assessments. That was the detail that shoved me into tears that lasted throughout the film: these men—fruits, faggots, queers—were already imprisoned by shame.
Please read her whole entry.
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