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FOR THE BOYS: Sean Penn (center) stars as Harvey Milk in the eponymous drama.

On Nov. 4, same-sex marriage advocates suffered a setback when Californians narrowly passed the Proposition 8 ballot initiative ensuring that the state would only recognize marriages between men and women. The biopic Milk screened in Atlanta three days later, and its portrait of gay activism and California politics feels almost shockingly immediate, despite taking place three decades earlier.

Oscar winner Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk, a pioneering gay rights advocate who challenged hostile attitudes and institutional oppression, most notably Proposition 6, a California ballot initiative designed to fire schoolteachers suspected of being gay. In some ways Milk proves to be a tame, conventional film biography, but the post-Prop 8 climate gives it an urgency and relevance that may have been missing had it opened a month or two ago. (more…)

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I’m as guilty as the next guy. Last summer critics crowned filmmaker Judd Apatow the king of big-screen comedy following his hilarious hits Knocked Up, which he wrote and directed, and Superbad, which he co-wrote and produced. I wondered whether Apatow would follow in the footsteps of the beloved Hal Ashby as a crafter of wise but raucous humanist comedies.

One year later, the sight of Apatow Productions in film credits seems more like a warning sign than a seal of approval. The rival siblings of July 25’s Step Brothers and the fugitive stoners of this Wednesday’s Pineapple Express amount to a strikingly ineffectual one-two punch. Clearly last year’s Apatow adulation set a standard that cannot or will not be met by every movie with his name on it. Apatow Productions doesn’t guarantee smart laughs in the same way that, say, Pixar does.

Apatow’s core movies comprise the clearly personal films he wrote and directed, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, plus, presumably, next year’s Funny People with Adam Sandler. Then comes an inner circle of films he co-wrote or that otherwise involve protégés from the TV show “Freaks and Geeks,” such as Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. His influence seems far more tangential on Will Ferrell’s comedies Anchorman and Talladega Nights, the success of which helped secure green lights for Apatow’s smaller-scale films.

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(Image by Dale Robinette)

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