You gotta wonder if this movie had been released earlier, before the November elections, if Prop 8 would have been defeated. Sean Penn is indeed stellar as Harvey Milk, and the message of the movie is one that I fail to see anyone not aligning with. Then again, millions of people apparently wouldn't agree and so California is stuck in man-woman marriage hell. The overall movie was quite good (I could have done with less marching) and all the performances were spot on.
I feel like I would have enjoyed a bit more detail about Milk's campaigns and his work but that's probably best left to Internet research anyway. It's tragic that thirty years after Milk helped get Prop 6 passed ("In 1978, Proposition 6 ('the Briggs Initiative') was the California ballot measure aimed at preventing gay people and supporters from working as teachers in public schools."), California has basically regressed. And for a film that challenges as well as illuminates, it's surprising that there wasn't a bigger national reaction -- good or bad -- to the film. It feels like it sort of slipped on by didn't it?
