Coming in the wake of the California Proposition 8 which abolishes same-sex marriages within the state, Milk is of as much political consequence now as its protagonist was 30 years previously. Directed by Gus Van Sant, Milk is the true story of gay rights leader Harvey Milk who stands for and gets elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, hence becoming the first openly gay official to be elected to public office. His struggle to reach out to the public and counteract their homophobia until he can carve out this landmark victory for himself is what comprises most of the movie.

  Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) comes to the gay capital of the world, Castro, with his lover Scott Smith (James Franco), a hippie and his first campaign manager. As Milk goes about campaigning, enlisting support and slowly building up a team of loyal supporters around him, one can’t help but be drawn in by his strength of purpose and his dream of emancipation. The movie hence caters not merely to audiences familiar with the politics of the United States in those times or in sympathy with gay rights, but also audiences who appreciate great human endeavour for a cause. Harvey Milk’s drive to achieve what he believes in to the total exclusion of everything else is a trait to be admired, even though it results in many personal tragedies for him. Milk’s success spree can only be put a stop to by his death, a measure his desperate colleague Dan White is finally driven to take. However Dan White (Josh Brolin) too is sensitively portrayed, not as a fiend but as a man pushed to his limit.

  Sean Penn’s Oscar winning performance as Harvey Milk is of course the highlight of the film. He has managed to emulate Milk’s quaint mannerisms to perfection, successfully capturing his great charisma, his indomitable spirit and innate kind heartedness. The performances of the rest of the cast are largely satisfactory and the storyline itself is fluid and engaging, if somewhat slow.

 Overall the movie is a hard hitting depiction of the poignant life and dedicated work of a brilliant though largely forgotten historical figure. While the movie released too late to affect Proposition 8, Sean Penn expressed the hope during his Oscar win that the movie be screened in the White House. This movie is capable of initiating a large scale change in people’s mindset, hence continuing Harvey Milk’s legacy and moving even further towards realizing his dreams.

My rating: 2.5/5

Life of Pi follows the extraordinary survival story of 16-year-old Piscine “Pissing” Patel, or as the protagonist would have it, Pi. The son of a zookeeper, Pi grew up among exotic animals, a fact he comes to be exceedingly grateful for when he finds himself stranded in the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a zebra, hyena, orang-utan and Bengal tiger for company after the ship taking them from Chennai to Canada sinks without a trace. His ordeal lasts for 227 days, almost seven months, in the course of which he loses his family, his shoes, his clothes, his eyesight, even his vegetarianism, but never his unwavering resolve to survive. Religion, in all its myriad forms and Richard Parker, the tiger become his sole means of comfort in the vast lonely ocean. While the tiger depended on Pi for sustenance, Pi clung to Richard Parker as the only thing that separated him from despair and hopelessness.

The very provocative yet intriguingly contradictory title of Joyce Carol Oates’s book grabs eyeballs. I admit this is what made me pick up this one fifty page book in the first place, and the rest of the book did not disappoint. Different in every respect of the word, this thought provoking novella narrates the traumatic turn Teena and her family’s lives take after her brutal gang rape at the hands of a few local hooligans. Explicit, disturbing, and yet heartbreakingly human, right from the start the narrative is skillfully intertwined with the brutal aftermath.

In this story about rage, rape and love, Joyce once again emerges as the master teller of tales about hapless women victimized by men. It highlights the disastrous turn a single day; a single decision can take when Teena Maguire chooses to take a shortcut after watching the Fourth of July fireworks with her daughter. Bethie has to hide within hearing range of her mother being brutally raped and murderously thrashed. What ensues is a fledgling struggle for justice.   Legal justice may elude them but Oates through her brilliantly conceived character of Officer Droomor ensures that poetic justice is delivered in the end

In its very rawness, the book is both compelling and repelling. Oates minces no words in the description of the caustic mind numbing violence that the female protagonists are subjected to. The book itself becomes an attack and critique on the imbecilic misogynists, in whose minds the author is so brilliantly and astonishingly able to project herself. As one critic very appropriately sums it up, “Rape: A love Story, is a diamond-hard dissection of modern mores, it is also the tale of Teena and Bethie’s silent champion – a man who knows the meaning of justice. And love.”

An extraordinary film based on an immensely powerful novel of the same name by Alice Walker, The Color Purple is a reflection on the conditions prevailing in the United States in the early 1900s, and the state of African American women in those times. Directed by Steven Spielberg, the film tells the story of Celie Harris (Whoopi Goldberg), a poor African American girl growing up in the Southern United States. Celie is a victim of early abuse, having been twice impregnated by the man she believes to be her father by the age of fourteen. Her children are taken away from her and she is made to marry a local farmer Albert Johnson (Danny Glover) who had had his eyes on her younger sister Nettie. She suffers further abuse, verbal and physical, at the hands of her husband, until she is left a mere silent shadow of a being, devoid of any spirit. The one bright spot in Celie’s life is her sister Nettie who comes to stay with them in order to escape their father’s lasciviousness. However when Nettie rejects Albert’s advances, he forces her to leave by physically throwing her out in what makes a heart wrenching scene, with Celie desperately clinging on to her sister. Nettie leaves, promising to write, but Celie never receives her letters, making her believe that her sister had died. After Nettie’s departure Celie falls further into her pit of despair. Her step-son Harpo marries a vocal, intimidating woman names Sophia (Oprah Winfrey) but when he attempts to lord over her she leaves him, taking her children with her. The sudden reappearance of Alfred’s old lover, Shug Avery (Margaret Avery), is the turning point for Celie, as she finds herself increasingly attracted to Shug. Shug is the one who inspires Celie to throw of her diffidence and recover some of her old spirit. News from her sister further lends Celie strength until she is able to defy Albert and leave together with Shug. After many tumultuous events and emotional scenes the movie ends with Celie’s touching reunion with her children and Nettie and indication of a change of heart in Albert.

The movie is a disturbing revelation of the cruel and brutal treatment meted out to women in a society where they are commoditized. The double subjugation suffered for being a black and a woman is clear in a time when a ‘coloured’ man was treated as sub-human by the whites and a ‘coloured’ woman treated even worse by the men. This is spelled out unerringly in the movie when Alfred screams out to Celie as she drives away from him, “You’re black, you’re poor, you’re ugly, you’re a woman, you’re nothing at all!”

 The movie scarcely follows the plot of the novel, with a large chunk of the original story missing, which includes Nettie’s account of Africa. Moreover the entire issue of lesbianism, which is a major theme in the book, is barely hinted at due to its controversial nature. However in spite of its drawbacks the movie is still one of Spielberg’s finest creations. It is successful in portraying a heart rending account of a woman who learns to fight against injustice and the agents of her suffering. Spectacular performances on the part of the entire cast, flawless direction and a moving story line makes this movie well deserving of its title as a classic.