Gus Van Sant’s Milk, a skillful and impassioned argument for gay rights, may have come out too late. As proponents of equal marriage rights are still reeling from the passage of Prop 8 in California, the film finds itself the subject of bitter irony, rather than the center of a political victory parade that could have been. Milk is saturated with politics, both on screen and off. It’s not too hard to imagine Sean Penn’s speech should he win an Oscar, and Van Sant has done a fair bit of political maneuvering in an effort to give him that opportunity.

Tom Cruise has done some politicking to get audiences to warm up to his Hitler assassination plot thriller, Valkyrie. Can he bury bury the couch-jumping and psychology-bashing hatchets quick enough to enjoy a successful holiday at the box office?

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

0:00 - Intro

1:32 - Milk

25:06 - Valkyrie

filmcouch-101

• “If they had to do it all over again, would DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg and his partner Stacey Snider have left their lucrative deal at Paramount Pictures, where their slate of films had thrived, if they had foreseen the worsening financial environment?” According to Anne Thompson, DreamWorks is having a lot of trouble raising money during the credit crunch, and Spielberg and Snider may have to settle on a smaller business plan. On her blog, Thompson simplifies things: “But it’s Steven Spielberg! It doesn’t matter. The banks aren’t lending to anybody. It’s sheer bad luck.”
• Ari Folman is following up his winning animated doc Waltz With Bashir with an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi short story The Futurological Congress, which will begin as live-action then transition to animation. “Think of your favorite young actress. She’ll appear that way at the beginning, and then as the film goes on, she’ll be drawn like she’s 50,” Folman explains. So, like Kate Winslet in The Reader, but as a cartoon rather than with distracting aging makeup.
• Barry Sonnenfeld will direct another sci-fi action comedy called The How-To Guide for Saving the World, which sounds like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if Arthur and Ford had been able to use their book to twart the Vogon’s demolishon of Earth.
• Billy Ray will direct his own adaptation of the supernatural novel Conjure Wife, which has been filmed three times previously. The premise sounds like Bewitched as a horror film.
• Adam Shankman, who raised his comedy rep recently with Prop 8: The Musical (and may lower it again now with Bedtime Stories), has added another musical and another f/x extravanza to his pipeline. The former is the high-concept Bob the Musical; the latter is the long-in-works revival of Sinbad.

Did you know that legalizing gay marriage could turn the economy around? Well, don’t take my word for it, but Neil Patrick Harris presents a pretty convincing argument…in song. He and a whole slew of big name comedic actors, including Jack Black, John C. Reilly, Allison Janney, Maya Rudolph, Andy Richter, Margaret Cho, Kathy Najimy, Rashida Jones and Craig Robinson, have united for an exclusive video from FunnyorDie.com that functions as a hilarious and tuneful protest of Proposition 8. And the songs are well-written too, since the whole thing was conceived and written by five-time Oscar-nominated composer Marc Shaiman. Hairspray director/choreographer Adam Shankman directed it.

In additon to supporting a cause, the video provides another surprising reason for me to regain interest in Jack Black. He’s terrific as Jesus here, and thanks to other recent online performances, such as his silent turn as Ben Franklin, I have a newfound enjoyment of his talents. Maybe he can somehow limit his career to the web and I can ignore all the obnoxious films he’s made in the last decade.

Anyway, check out the Prop 8 musical after the jump.

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So, we’re taking the rest of the week off. Enjoy your, uh, eating and shopping? That’s what people do, right? (I’m half-English, so I’m only half willing to admit that Thanksgiving even exists.) But first, for your holiday browsing pleasure, here are a bunch of stories from this week that I meant to comment on but ran out of time. Let me know if there’s anything in particular that you’d like me to revisit in depth next week.

• “Auteurism had Andrew Sarris. Abstract expressionism had Clement Greenberg. Punk rock had Lester Bangs. Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” So ponders Thom Powers, before offering a number of tips for those of us who might aim to fill the position.
• “Is there room in that diverse [film festival] community for people of faith? For people of more conservative political beliefs? Or are film festivals only for the support and promotion of those who agree with a specific, left-of-center political philosophy? And therefore, must major film festivals — and their primary staff — have a de facto bias toward that philosphy?” AJ Schnack examines the implications of the Prop 8/Rich Raddon situation.
• Eric Kohn visited the Futures of Entertainment conference, sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT. “As the conversations progressed, so too did a flurry of typing from numerous laptops throughout the audience: Microblogging and online chatter created a series of miniature conversations that converged into a unified whole.”
• In the second of potentially three posts on Synechdoche, NY, Filmbrain runs Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut through the ringer of the Jungian concept of individuation. “The individuation process is about the uniting of opposites — good and evil, masculine and feminine, matter and spirit, body and psyche. There’s no question that Caden undertakes the journey, but he fails to become an individual, both literally and psychologically. Caden treats his life (both the conscious and unconscious elements) like a stage play, yet his attempt at directing from an omniscient position robs him of (in alchemical terms) the prima materia required for one to be a person.”

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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I had heard a rumor about this earlier this morning, but Mike Jones at The Circuit is the first to confirm it: Rich Raddon has resigned from his post as the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival. Raddon, who is a practicing Mormon, first submitted his resignation last week, when it was revealed that he had made sizable donationto the campaign in support of California’s anti-gay-marriage Propositon 8. The FIND Independent board who govern LAFF chose not to accept the resignation, but instead met, talked it out and took no action. The conversations calling out Raddon for putting his money where his beliefs are did not stop, and when Raddon submitted his resignation again last night, LAFF accepted it.

UPDATE: As I commented below, I didn’t mean above to take a stance one way or another on any of these issues, and I think if anybody had read what I wrote carefully rather than jumping to conclusions, they would see that. But because nobody seems interested in actually reading anything carefully and I don’t have time to defend an innocuous statements from the instant emotional responses of everyone on the internet, I’ve deleted a paragraph in which I essentially said that this is a bad situation for all involved.

Irony held center stage at the press conference for Milk, Gus Van Sant’s passionate biopic about the first openly gay man elected to higher office in the United States, that took place at The Regency Hotel in Manhattan a little more than two weeks after the passing of California’s (heavily financed by the Mormon Church) Proposition 8, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. It was Supervisor Harvey Milk himself who had been instrumental in the defeat of California’s Proposition 6 (a battle featured prominently in the film), which had been openly opposed by everyone from Governor Jerry Brown to Carter and Reagan. The victory over the measure that would have effectively banned homosexual teachers and their allies from the public school system occurred in the same (non-election) year Milk was assassinated along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, exactly three decades ago this month. Since those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, it’s no surprise Harvey Milk is not a household name, not even to the many young actors starring in Milk, who became aware of him only upon receiving the script.

And this is something Van Sant, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who grew up gay and Mormon in California, and was the sole Mormon writer/producer on the Mormon-themed Big Love – yes, as I said, irony ruled the day!) and the panel of actors, including Sean Penn (Harvey Milk), James Franco (Milk’s lover Scott), Josh Brolin (assassin Dan White), Alison Pill (campaign manager Anne Kronenberg) and Emile Hirsch (Milk protégé/activist Cleve Jones) have set out to rectify. …Read more

Even as the champagne was still flowing across the nation in celebration of Barack Obama’s historic victory, protests were raging in California after Proposition 8, defining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman, passed with nary a hitch. By chance this was also the week I finally got around to watching Fatih Akin’s stunning follow-up to his rightly lauded Head-On, The Edge of Heaven, recently released on DVD. It’s hard to believe Akin, the biggest talent to come out of German cinema since Fassbinder, is only 35 years old. Indeed, the depth of the script, the subtlety of the Turkish score, the nuanced camerawork and self-assured editing are that of a master director. As is the poignancy with which Akin invests the breathtaking lesbian love story, which both connects the first and last parts of his international trilogy, and is the beating heart of the film. If those same-sex marriage advocates are ever in need of a cautionary tale that could serve as a Prop 8 teaching tool, “Lotte’s Death” (as part two is titled) is it.

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Last week after California passed the gay marriage ban Proposition 8, gay rights advocate and blogger John Aravosis called for a boycott of Utah businesses, specifically the Sundance Film Festival, which is headquartered at the Park City Marriott, which is owned by pro-Prop 8 donor Brent Andrus. Aravosis’ logic was that if the Mormon church was going to pump money into supporting a law that would impact Hollywood liberals, Hollywood liberals should enact their revenge by refusing to pump money into Mormon businesses.

I didn’t hop on this story when I first heard about it over the weekend, because it seemed so obviously crazy that I thought it would never stick. With Prop 8 now in the hands of the appellate courts, why waste energy on a revenge gambit that would inflict major collateral damage on innocent bystanders? And in fact, by Monday the indie film community at large began speaking out against the proposed boycott. …Read more

• Is it possible to concentrate on ANYTHING other than the election today? Does that not make today the perfect day for MGM to announce that they’re letting the Farrelly Brothers make a Three Stooges movie?
• Meanwhile, Variety has a rundown of what various famous people are up to today. MagiC Johnson lent his voice to a No on Prop 8 robocall, Hollywood Republicans (they exist!) are meeting up at Barney’s Beanery, and Harvey Weinstein is throwing a party in New York (no, we were not invited).
• Election, schmerschmection: Charlize Theron will star as a sexy (one assumes) Interpol agent opposite Tom Cruise in The Tourist; Arthouse Films will distribute the documentary Herb and Dorothy; and Michael Douglas will be honored by the PGA in January.

It looks like the pre-election battle over California’s Propositon 8 (which would render gay marriages illegal in the state) could provide the backdrop to a scene in Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming Borat follow-up. Cohen showed up at a Yes on 8 rally this weekend in character as Bruno, the gay Austrian fashion designer, and apparently initally blended into the crowd — camera crew and all — but was eventually recognized, at which point he fled the scene. The write-ups I’ve read don’t indicate that Bruno was doing/saying anything controversial or even contrary to the anti-gay marriage message of the rally, so one wonders what he was saying/doing. Can anyone make sense of that sign he’s holding above?

UPDATE: FilmDrunk says Baron was not dressed as Bruno at all, but as “his new character, Straight Dave.” The appearance at the rally suddenly makes more sense.