Say Anything Blog

We have two films slated for the screen this weekend that are sure to spark debate. Ron Howard’s adaptation of Peter Morgan’s award-winning Frost/Nixon is, according to the director, some kind of reverse-pretzel-half-pipe-timeline commentary (read: ass-backwards logic) on George Bush’s presidency. Be that as it may, Frost/Nixon (at least the play, we’ll see about the movie) was a prophetic conviction of today’s journalistic standards.

Milk is, ostensibly, Sean Penn’s latest tour de force. He doesn’t play retarded which, in my opinion, is his most natural state, but he does play Harvey Milk, the San Francisco Supervisor who was the first actively gay man to hold public office. He gets shot. His killer gets a lenient sentence in what is now the notorious “Twinkie Defense.” (Apparently sugar – not bigotry – sparked the shooting.) Riots ensued. Diminished capacity laws were repealed.