Milk

Sean Penn stars as Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant's Milk (Focus Features)

Filmmaker Gus Van Sant leaves his usual dreamy, elliptical storytelling behind to deliver a more conventionally structured narrative about unconventional activist and politician Harvey Milk in his new film Milk (opening at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas). The film is equal parts biography and look back on the roots of gay activism. Van Sant makes superb use of archival footage to chronicle Milk's rise to political power as California's first openly gay elected official. Too bad the film didn't open before this year's election, maybe the film's plea for tolerance could have swayed some voters about Proposition 8. The film looks to an election some three decades ago in which Milk helped organize opposition to a proposition (Prop 6) that would have banned gays from teaching in California. That bill's defeat contrasts with this year's passage of a ban on same sex marriage, and the film makes you realize that some things and some attitudes have not changed and maybe even are moving backwards. Sean Penn stars as Milk and his performance seems self-conscious at first but grows in strength. Listen to the discussion about the film on this month's KPBS Film Club of the Air.

Companion viewing: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, To Die For, The Best Man

The Express / Interview with Dennis Quaid

Most people know the name of football player Jim Brown. But not even sports fans may be familiar with the name of Ernie Davis, the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy. The new film The Express (opening October 10 throughout San Diego) chronicles his brief, bright career.You can listen to my radio feature or watch a video of my interview with Dennis Quaid who came to San Diego last month to talk about the film.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Simon Pegg in his glory in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (MGM)

I have made no secret of the fact that I love Simon Pegg. He won me over with Shaun of the Dead, a rom-zom-com that he wrote and starred in. Then secured that place in my heart with the Brit-com TV series Spaced (which was made before Shaun but was hard to track down in the U.S.), which is also wrote and starred in. His creative efforts reveal a fine attention to detail and a savvy sense of pop culture. But in the films where he's had less creative input, he's been less good (Mission Impossible 3, Run Fatboy Run). But now he has a project that seems a bit more worthy of his talents - How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (opening October 3 throughout San Diego), based on British journalist Toby Young's memoirs about his failed five-year attempt to make it as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine.

Flash of Genius / Interview with Greg Kinnear

Greg Kinnear stars as Dr. Robert Kearns in Flash of Genius (Universal)

After seeing the film Flash of Genius (opening October 2 throughout San Diego) you may never look at your windshield wipers in the same way. In the film, Greg Kinnear plays Dr. Robert Kearns, a Detroit engineer who invents the intermittent windshield wiper and then has the idea stolen by Ford. It's based on a true story and on a New Yorker magazine article by John Searbrook. It's a classic David versus Goliath as Kearns decides to take on Ford in their town of Detroit. Greg Kinnear says that the film is resonating with audiences.

Trailer Tuesday: Changeling

You know summer's coming to an end when Hollywood starts prepping all the Oscar-worthy dramas for release. Clint Eastwood has won Best Picture Oscars for Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven, and I'm sure Universal is hoping for gold with his latest film Changeling. The film stars Angelina Jolie as Christine Collins, a single mom in 1920s Los Angeles. Her son disappears and when the police bring the child back, Collins says it's not her son. The film, based on true events, played at Cannes and will play at the New York Film Festival in early October before opening on October 31. John Malkovich co-stars and Eastwood again contributes a score. The trailer is courtesy of Universal.

Mongol

Tadanobu Asano stars as Genghis Khan in the new film Mongol (Picturehouse)

Genghis Khan is probably best remembered as a bloody conqueror. But to Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov the Mongol ruler was much more than that. Bodrov attempts to correct some misconceptions about the 13th century leader with his Oscar nominated film Mongol (opening June 20 at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas. (You can listen to our KPBS Film Club discussion of the film and to my interview with the director for The World.)

Genghis Khan is a well-known name in Russia, though the Mongol conqueror is not remembered fondly there, says director Sergei Bodrov.

SERGEI BODROV: "He was described as the cruelest person in the world but he was so bad in all my school books that when I was growing up that I started to be suspicious. His history was written by his enemies. And you have to question this."

And that's what Bodrov's new film Mongol does. It questions how history has depicted Genghis Khan. The film focuses on the Mongol ruler's youth, when he was known simply as Temudgin (played by an impressive Odnyam Odsuren as a boy, and with quiet confidence by Japan's Tadanobu Asano as an adult).

Into the Wild on DVD

Emile Hirsch as Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild (Paramount Vantage)

Paramount Vantage delayed the DVD release of Into the Wild from February 12 to March I1 probably in the hopes of being able to add a sticker saying "with Oscar-winner Hal Holbrook." But old Hollywood vets just aren't winning votes any more, and Into the Wild failed to nab gold in either of its Oscar bids. So in hindsight, a DVD release before the awards might have generated more interest than having the DVD arrive after the film has become an official loser. The film arrived on DVD yesterday and since I missed reviewing Into the Wild when it opened in theaters, I thought I'd catch up with it now.

In January of 1993, author and mountaineer Jon Krakauer wrote an article entitled "Death of an Innocent" for Outsider Magazine. The article was about Christopher Johnson McCandless, a young man from an affluent East Coast family. He graduated with honors from Emory University, gave away his entire savings to charity, hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mount McKinley with tragic results. The article generated more mail than any other article in the magazine's history. Some admired McCandless' idealism and independent spirit; others thought him a fool or an arrogant idiot. The article proved to be just the beginning of Krakauer's obsessive quest to discover more about McCandless.

The Counterfeiters

Catching up with The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures)

My apologies for not getting to The Counterfeiters (opened March 7 at Landmark’s La Jolla Village Theaters) sooner but I’ve been overwhelmed (and happily so) by the San Diego Latino Film Festival and haven’t had the time to focus on this serious film. (It’s much easier to quickly review mindless fodder like 10,000 B.C.) The Counterfeiters, an Austrian-German co-production, picked up the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar last month and I’m sure that helped the film find a bigger audience more than my review could ever have helped. But in case you missed this film in its opening week, I just want to belatedly  highlight it since it will be held over for at least one more week.

The Assassination of Jesse James

Brad Pitt as Jesse James in The Assassination of... (Warner Bros.)

The full name of this film didn't fit in the headline: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Now that's not quite up to the word count of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, but assassination does figure prominently in each. And in the case of The Assassination of Jesse James (opened Oct. 12 throughout San Diego), the lengthiness of the title foreshadows the excesses of the film.

Here's a simple rule: If the audience knows a film's final destination in this case Robert Ford shooting outlaw Jesse James the filmmaker darn well better better make the journey interesting because there are no surprises lurking ahead. The life and death of outlaw Jesse James has been told many times before, sometimes romanticizing him (as with Tyrone Power in the 1939 film) and sometimes presenting him as a dangerous psychopath (Robert Duvall in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid). James has secured himself a place in American folklore since his death in 1882 at the hands of one of his own gang, Robert Ford. James had fought with the ruthless Confederate guerrilla fighters, Quantrill's Raiders during the Civil War and then turned to robbing banks, trains and the occasional stage coach. Some newspapers portrayed him as a kind of Robin Hood and small farmers probably derived some satisfaction from the way the James Gang stuck it to the big businesses of the time -- the banks and trains. What all this means is that James has long been a subject of fascination for a variety of media.

The New World/Interview with Q’Orianka Kilcher

Everyone probably knows the story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas.

JOHN SMITH: At the moment I was to die she threw herself upon me

Pocahontas is celebrated for saving the life of Smith, an English soldier in Jamestown who was to have been put to death in 1608 by the Indian princess father. Filmmaker Terence Malick uses this famous incident as the leaping off point for a lyrical mediation on love in The New World.

Despite a long career, Malick hasnt made many films. In fact, hes only made four in three decades. But with each successive work, hes been more inclined to dispense with dialogue and instead to rely on images to tell his story. So his visually stunning films Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and now The New World have become progressively more poetic.