Word: castro
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...week, a Bay Area civil-service building named for him. The first openly homosexual city supervisor in the U.S., he organized gays into a potent political force. Then there are the movies. Bryan Singer, director of X-Men and Superman Returns, is completing a Milk documentary, The Mayor of Castro Street. Today we get Milk, a hurtling, minutely researched, close-to-irresistible biopic starring Academy Award winner Sean Penn, whose performance is likely to be nominated for another Oscar, as is this film. That makes it official: Harvey Milk is the gay Joan...
...Harvey Milk story needs little Hollywood embellishment; it's already the perfect outsider fable. A Manhattan investment banker raised on Long Island, Milk arrived in San Francisco in the early '70s. He opened Castro Camera in the run-down Castro district, which was fast becoming an enclave for the not-yet-outspoken gay culture. With the aid of an unlikely ally, the Teamsters, he organized a boycott of Coors Beer, which at the time refused to hire gays. After three losing runs for a city supervisor seat, he won in 1977, and a year later he helped defeat Proposition...
...politician," Milk was at least as much the latter as the former - a genius in convincing people that what he wanted was what they needed. So is the movie. It revels in showing how Milk built his campaign staff from the lovers and locals who wandered into Castro Camera; how he fought the city's gay establishment, until then discreet in identifying itself; how he debated John Briggs, the sponsor of Prop. 6, to a standstill and was instrumental in having the initiative defeated by more than a million votes. You've never seen this before: a movie that builds...
...through the 1990s. To pan the camera toward the Florida Straits is to raise a question that can't be asked out loud: Is this the year for change? Quizás, they say in Cuba: maybe. Quizás the new U.S. President will end the blockade. Quizás Raúl Castro, who just celebrated his first Independence Day as President, will be a big reformer. He's showing small signs that he might: some workers now get paid based on performance, those who can afford cell phones can legally own them, and since October some farmers can lease their own land...
...will be difficult times with its neighbor to the north. Even before the murderous enticement of Washington's wet-foot, dry-foot policy that rewards Cubans who survive the trip across the waters with citizenship (while denying many visa requests made through proper channels in Havana)--even before Fidel Castro--relationships have been uneasy between Cuba and the U.S., which essentially colonized the island after Spain left in 1898. There was the U.S. administrator who in the early 1900s announced plans to "whiten" the population. And the 1901 Platt Amendment, which helped carve the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo...