Gus Van Sant’s best-known films (which are not the same as his best films) have historically involved a certain grappling with What Hollywood Does. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, platitude-spouting Robin Williams. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, laughable slang-spouting Sean Connery. Hollywood flatters its flavors of the month by shoe-horning them into paint-by-numbers remakes of aged cinematic game changers. Etc. Anyone cognizant of Van Sant’s turn-of-the-century Hollywood period shouldn’t be surprised by his willing ability to play it straight.

To say that Van Sant continues to “play it straight” with Milk isn’t meant as a pun regarding sexuality, exactly, but said pun wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. If his Hollywood trilogy was what Van Sant needed to get from his early meditations on the emotional lives of low-lifes to his much-vaunted Death Trilogy, then that most recent career phase may be what Van Sant needed to work through in order to merge the first two modes of his career. Milk takes the defining moments of a subculture once perceived by the mainstream as deviant, and runs it through the mill of What Hollywood Does, thereby sanitizing its hero for mainstream martyrhood. Van Sant’s laundering of an outsider hero through the very inside mechanism of the Hollywood biopic has been variously described as heroic and distasteful. As of press time, I think it’s somewhere in between.

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The gay marriage debate seems to have been relegated to the back-burner of late (apparently, there’s a war going on). Could Adam Sandler help bring it back?

At AfterElton.com [via GreenCine Daily] Alonso Duralde says I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry “will probably do more for the national debate on gay marriage than every book written by conservative gay writer Andrew Sullivan and every letter you’ve sent to your senator put together.” He goes on to explain that this is mostly because “average” Americans are apparently willing to pay money to see Adam Sandler do just about anything, regardless of whether or not the themes of his films jibe with their personal preferences or political beliefs. It seems like a valid point, even if Paul Thomas Anderson might disagree.

But at the Village Voice, Nathan Lee has much more fun nailing Chuck and Larry’s potential power; the openly gay critic boldly claims that the film is “as eloquent as Brokeback Mountain, and even more radical.” (Lee, it should be noted, famously defended Brokeback’s “middle-brow man-on-man masochistic romanticism” around the time of that film’s release.) The whole review is basically begging to be blockquoted, but here’s a choice excerpt:

This sodomite had a gay old time. The coup of the movie is that Sandlerites will, too. They’re the ones unmistakably addressed in the courtroom climax, the moment when Chuck and Larry confess their deceptions and assert their principles. Momentarily possessed by remarkable authenticity, Sandler seems to step out of character as he appeals to the crowd to stop using the word “faggot.” I’ve used it a lot myself in the past, he says in a manner less like a line reading than a mea culpa, but it hurts the same way it does if you called me a kike.

Meanwhile, Jeff Wells links to a clip of Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff promoting his boycott of Hairspray on The O’Reilly Factor. Naff says Scientology is anti-gay, and since John Travolta is a Scientologist, ergo, a film that began life as a Broadway musical based on a cult film starring a drag queen and written/directed by the most successful openly-gay filmmaker of the last thirty years is — wait for it — also anti-gay. “Gay people are not so desperate for entertainment that we should be lining the pockets of those who want to cure us,” Naff huffs. Adam Shankman, director of the new Hairspray, responded: “Everybody involved in Hairspray - all the creators - are gay…me, the writers, composer, John Waters - all gay.”

I guess the only question is this: how many gay pockets do you need to line to outweigh the damage done by putting cash in the pants of one Scientologist?