It's much as you've heard: Milk is a very good movie. I haven't seen Mickey Rourke in the wrestler yet, but it's hard to imagine that Penn doesn't take the Oscar for best actor. He disappears into the role. I don't have any interesting thoughts on the movie, though it certainly made me want to read The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk
. The movie's one flaw -- and it's a failure of the form rather than the film -- is that it's not able to offer much insight on the broader questions of the early gay rights movement. For instance: Why did the gay rights movement diverge so aggressively from its forerunner, the civil rights movement? The latter worked assiduously to appear non-threatening, to conform. Protests were conducted in suits and dresses. Order was paramount. The strategy was to assert normalcy. Much of the early gay rights movement took the opposite tack. The protests and parades played up difference, and asserted its legitimacy. That was the movement Harvey Milk came out of, and the movie emphasize his continued adherence to its ideals, but it doesn't shed much light on where they came from.Related: Read Eli Sanders' review of Milk, and analysis of what it says about gay rights today. 
