Triumph over adversity counts more than revelation of character.

I thought there was some of that in Milk, that’s all. Maybe it was just the ending sequence which got up my nose.

Well, I don’t think Penn can be faulted for his portrayal of Milk. I do think, however, that Cleve Jones, who was an advisor to the screenwriter, was perhaps a little too interested in settling old scores and, in addition, was really not well acquainted with many key players and the issues driving San Francisco’s community-based political movement.

I knew Harvey Milk and liked him. Danny White and I had grown up a few blocks from each other and had been acquaintances since we were teenagers. We also attended the same high school. Harvey and Danny, however, had not been major players in the effort to change the process for electing the city’s Board of Supervisors. This is a minor point in a larger story but San Francisco did have an active progressive political base before Harvey Milk, rest his soul, moved to the city.

I have no idea what this means. Wish I did, though. Tried googling ‘poe’ as slang transitive verb, but came up with nothing.

Probably too late on this thread to get a response. Oh well.

MB - If you check in here, could you, perhaps, hazard a guess?

Dave, if you’re called Dr. Carby you’re nometically predetermined to throw vitriol, or so I suppose.

I agree but that is one of the risks or problems of aspirational films. The edges are rounded off and unpleasant facts and issues are discarded. Triumph over adversity counts more than revelation of character.

No, that’s HNO3, a.k.a nitric acid, as in vitriol, like what Dr. Carby is throwing. (Actually that’s sulfuric acid, but never mind).

(HNOC would have worked better, but – heh – I’m not an academic)

Anyway, Darryl @ 42: Yes, I agree that you were already in the game when the going got tougher but I wonder if you were fully aware of the stakes folks were actually jousting over.

I think it’s safe to say I had no whatsoever clue, as Ms. Monie Love once put it. As for the grass-and-elephants proverb: yes, Janet probably said, “you know the proverb Melvin Tolson used to cite.” Half of my first book was on Tolson, and if you’d told me in 1988 that Denzel Washington would someday portray him in a Major Motion Picture I would have said you were mad, mad I say. Denzel—and the film in general—could have done a better job of evoking Tolson (Denzel was basically playing Denzel), but hey, I was just glad to see it.

Alarob @ 47: Main differences between the blogs and academic debate: Academics are usually better spellers.

True! Blog commenters spell “Cornel West is teh rOxxOr intellectual” wrong all the time, usually by spelling Cornel with two l’s. Oh, and I see that Zamfir @ 46 is cookin’ MCs like a pound of bacon.

And Tim @ 52 claims that this generic academic argument is new or novel, but he’s wrong—it’s got a long history, which Tim truncates in order to position his own comment as the “reasonable” response to the author’s reaction to a really belated and kinda remarkable reaction to a reaction to black public intellectuals circa 1995.