Alaska Employment Law

Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan - Though I recently raved about McEwan in my reviews of The Innocent and On Chesil Beach, I am sorry to say that I thought Amsterdam was a real stinker.  And it won the Booker Prize in England, so go figure.  In Amsterdam, two old friends, one a renowned composer of classical music and one a publisher, meet at the funeral of a woman they both had loved.  (Her husband is there too, of course.)  Most of the plot turns on the publisher’s decision to print photographs that have unexpectedly come to his attention, showing an important political figure, reviled by both of the friends, in a highly compromised situation.  However, the two men fiercely disagree on whether the photographs should be published.  Things play out, morals are paraded around the room, and the two friends eventually meet in Amsterdam, where the plot goes deus ex machina, or, maybe it would be better to say in modern parlance, shark ex machina.  A completely unsatisfying, completely not believable ending, in my opinion.  Avoid.

Milk, starring Sean Penn - The story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to significant political office in the United States, is well known.  Milk, a San Francisco city supervisor, was assassinated in 1978 along with the mayor of the city, George Moscone. Sean Penn is stupendous in this film - an absolutely compelling, convincing Harvey Milk.  The portrait of the Castro District in the early 1970s is really effective.  Some minor characters are not as well drawn out as I might have hoped, particularly Milk’s killer, Dan White, who is known in the annals of law for mounting (with some success) the “Twinkie defense” to the charges of murder against him.  I thought this was a great movie; my wife thought it was a bit drawn out, but I disagree.  This is an especially significant film in the wake of the passage in November of Proposition 8 in California.  By the way, you might want to brush up on the plot of Puccini’s Tosca before you go - but go!