Britain on Film - The Reality Gap

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Milk

2008
Starring: Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, Diego Luna
Director: Gus Van Sant
Runtime: 128 Minutes
Distributor: Focus Features
Rating: R

Director Gus Van Sant flirted with this project, with Sean Penn as the lead, way back in 1993 when Oliver Stone was looking to produce, but passed citing script problems. Now the inimitably divisive auteur returns to this studied biopic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office, with a script from HBO scribe Dustin Lance Black. Lifting his story from actual testimony recorded by a then fearful and paranoid Milk, Van Sant charts Milk’s rise to national prominence and ultimate assassination at the hands of a disturbed political rival.

An aging, dissatisfied New Yorker, Milk is the kind of quietly assertive queen that would be lynched the minute he set a foot below the Mason-Dixon line. One night he meets fellow nice boy Scott (James Franco) on the subway and whisks him off to San Francisco to live happily ever after. Setting up a small camera store in the fashionable gay quarter dubbed ‘The Castro’ Milk encounters stiff prejudice from the large Irish Catholic community surrounding the tiny district that are none too pleased with the growing number of new arrivals.

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Opening This Week

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United 93

2006
Starring: J.J Johnson, Polly Adams, Jamie Harding, John Moraitis, Gregg Henry, James Fox, Michael Bencal
Director: Paul Greengrass
Runtime: 111 Minutes
Distributor: Universal
Rating: R

United 93 has the distinction of being the first mainstream Hollywood film to take its story directly from the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks. British writer/director Paul Greengrass unfolds the infamous events and lays them out in a real time narrative that takes us inside the FAA, the Boston and Cleveland control centers, and SAC NORAD to show what apparently happened as authorities tried to come to terms with the events of that day along with how and why they were ultimately unable to do anything to stop them.

Given the extensive and lengthy investigative process that followed the attacks in attempt to find who if anyone was culpable, Greengrass had an unprecedented amount of data to research and draw from when writing United 93. Every single person remotely connected to that day has given lengthy depositions as to what they did, what they saw, what they weren’t able to do and why they weren’t able to do it. Aside from a little creative license at the climax (recordings strongly indicate that the passengers on board United Airlines flight 93 did indeed revolt, but whether they actually made it inside the cockpit is still a matter of much debate), we can pretty much take the film at its word that this is as definitive a version of events, at least on the ground, as we are ever likely to get.

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Killer Movie

Having suffered the indignity of being made to run around after Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie while they showcased their “talent” on TV’s The Simple Life, unit producer Jeff Fisher conceived a story telling of a pampered LA rich bitch who winds up in a backwater Dakota town and is pursued by a vicious serial killer. Amazing how ideas sometimes just come to you.

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Opening This Week

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JCVD

Broke, depressed, and exhausted, down on his luck eighties icon Jean Claude Van Damme returns home in search of sanctuary and a little privacy. Instead he finds himself embroiled in an international media circus when the local police mistakenly believe he is the mastermind behind a botched armed robbery turned siege at a local post office.

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Opening This Week

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Jericho

Starring: Skeet Ulrich, Lennie James, Gerald McRaney, Pamela Reed, Ashley Scott, Kenneth Mitchell
Created By: Steven Chbosky, Josh Schaer, Joanthan E. Steinberg
Original Air Date: 09/20/2006 – 05/09/2007
Network: CBS

One of the smash hits of the fall 2006 season, Jericho was cancelled following a ratings slump after the network unwisely chose to put the show on a 3 month hiatus. After disgruntled fans bombarded CBS offices with hundreds of pounds of peanuts, a reference to the shows season finale, CBS reconsidered its position and renewed the show for a further 7 episodes.

Jericho just might be the most high concept television show outside those that employ the supernatural. Tapping into a post 9/11 America, the show takes the good groundwork laid by shows like 24 and asks what would happen to the rest of us normal folk were a nuclear attack to take place?

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This is Not a Robbery

The debut feature from directorial trio Lucas Jansen, Adam Kurland, and Spencer Vreeman, This is not a Robbery chronicles the life, the times, and the multiple bank robberies commited by disgruntled, eighty-seven-year-old former millionaire J.L. “Red” Rountree.

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