It’s already been called the most important civil rights film of the decade, but only time will tell if Milk has any real impact on the gay marriage issue or any other related civil rights matter. Obviously the film, which is set thirty years in the past, can be appropriated by the campaign to overturn Proposition 8, but if that campaign is successful, it will be difficult to prove with certainty Milk contributed to the end result.
The Birth of a Nation may have inspired a reformation of the Ku Klux Klan and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner may have opened some minds to wider acceptance of interracial marriage (which had just recently been legalized). However, as Time magazine reported earlier this year, it’s quite rare for cinema to really change the world. A movie like Philadelphia easily gets moviegoers thinking about AIDS and discrimination, for instance, and Sicko exposes some of the supposed benefits of universal health care, yet most of these kinds of message films preach primarily to the choir.
But at least five films have made an actual difference, either on a local or national level. Will Milk join the small group of movies detailed below?
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It’s been more than 100 years since the Philadelphia Quakers changed their name to the Philadelphia Philadelphians, which was thankfully shortened to “Phillies” very quickly, probably by printers who were afraid of using up all of their ‘P’s in the printing press. Since being founded in 1883, they’ve been one of the most tenacious teams in baseball, winning six pennants, and the World Series in 1980. In fact, in all of American sports (not just baseball), the Phillies are the team that’s been in one city with one name for the longest time. They’re one game away from another World Series win tonight, despite being the Major League team with the most losses in history. We celebrate their scrappiness with a list of quintessential Philadelphia movies. Check them out after the break.
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In a crowded year for Best Actress contention, Anne Hathaway could be the only first-timer to receive an Oscar nomination in the lead category, possibly going up against mainstays such as her Devil Wears Prada costar Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet, as well as the less-nominated vets Nicole Kidman and Kristen Scott Thomas. Her main competition for the outsider, dark horse position is Frozen River’s Melissa Leo (who may benefit from her film’s initiatory screener campaign even though River’s theatrical release was early and hardly noticed), and Happy-Go-Lucky’s Sally Hawkins, whose film just debuted to favorable reviews citing her brilliant (as in talented and bright) performance. But Hathaway is sure to be the victor –– even though her performance in Rachel Getting Married is hardly deserving of such an honor.
The Oscar buzz for Hathaway has been high for weeks now, enough that the actress apparently joked about it in her Saturday Night Live monologue earlier this month (I thought of it as less a current-year expectation than a general career goal, but it’s made Risky Biz Blog’s Steven Zeitchik compare Hathaway to Catherine O’Hara’s buzz-afflicted character in For Your Consideration). The fact that she’s a well-known movie star should make Hathaway’s buzz continually more reportable by the press and more noticeable by both the public and the voters, which gives her some advantage over Leo and Hawkins in terms of cultural consciousness.
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Jonathan Demme has had an extremely successful career ever since directing Caged Heat in 1974. He won the Oscar for Best Director in 1992 with Silence of the Lambs, and helped Tom Hanks act his way to a Best Actor Oscar for Philadelphia. He’s also directed things as varied as a Saturday Night Live episode in 1980, the Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense, and Neil Young: Heart of Gold, with a new Young movie on the way in next year’s Trunk Show.
Rachel Getting Married represents another big change for him, as the film was shot completely handheld, features a lot of improvised dialogue, and uses ambient music from musicians actually on the set. It’s about as close to a Dogma film as you can get these days. We sat down with Jonathan in Toronto, and read on to find out what inspirations he drew on for this film, why he wanted to cast director Paul Thomas Anderson as the male lead, and how he came to work with Anne Hathaway.
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From the looks of it, Tom Quinn is having a pretty remarkable year. He started off by winning the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance with his positively Cassavetian take on a disintegrating South Philly Irish clan, The New Year’s Parade. This week, he became one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces in Independent Film. Although the director, writer, producer, DP, gaffer, editor, financier of this micro budget film doesn’t feel like an indiewood cop-out waiting to happen, we will certainly be seeing more from him soon. While we wait for Tom’s indie darling status to cement, I chatted with him for our Media Diet interview series about what he’s listening to, his plans to remake Darby O’Gill and The Little People and how he saw The Dark Knight like everyone else. …Read more
