J. Edgar Movie Review

Earlier this year I wrote a review of Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter that complained of my weariness with his recent lazy filmmaking. I almost began this review of his latest film, J. Edgar, the same way until I went back and read that one. But the fact remains that his biopic of the man who was director of the old Bureau of Investigations and then first Director of the FBI for a total of 48 years is tired, boring and absurd. This is lazy storytelling at its worst.

J. Edgar Hoover always was and remains to this day something of an enigma. We know him as the paranoid director who supposedly investigated his enemies and people he believed to be subversives and radicals. He’s widely suspected of illegally wiretapping and of keeping secret files that were ultimately never recovered (at least in full). There is strong suspicion he was a deeply closeted homosexual and may have maintained a long-term relationship with his number two man Clyde Tolson. There’s even some silly speculation that he was a cross-dresser. But we don’t know much about the man and his motivations for his paranoia and his jealousy when it came to FBI agents who absorbed more of the spotlight than he could stand.

Milk Movie Review

First published on American Madness on 20 December 2008.

Republished here with a typo correction.

Director Gus Van Sant has taken a break from his often inaccessible forays into (almost) experimental film to make Milk, a very typical Hollywood biopic about Harvey Milk, the nation’s first openly gay man to win major elected office and then assassinated shortly thereafter. I don’t use ‘typical’ pejoratively, rather as an observation of how Van Sant’s film follows most of the conventions of the genre and as a contrast to his other recent work. Van Sant also directed Good Will Hunting – a formulaic Hollywood film that I love.