- Studio: Red Flag Releasing (RFR)
- Release Date: Jun 18, 2010
- Critic Score
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75A hard-hitting exposé of a shameful episode.
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50It's marred by loaded language and a propagandistic tone that undercuts rather than promotes its purposes.
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80Cowan, a gay Mormon himself, deftly melds facts with emotions, alternating between a history of the church's anti-gay drive and interviews with those directly affected by it.
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67Filmmaker Reed Cowan (himself gay and raised Mormon) documents the church's considerable financial influence on Prop 8's passage. Then he expands his sad and furious homegrown film to record the misery of gay Mormons sometimes driven to suicide over being rejected by their church and families.
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50The highly emotional documentary is narrated by Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter for “Milk,” who, like Mr. Cowan, is gay and grew up in a Mormon household.
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40A chaotic sequence midway through shows Mormon and gay-rights protesters shouting abuse at each other in San Francisco, and that's pretty much what the whole movie feels like.
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80As an exposé, there could hardly be a stronger case for ensuring and strengthening the separation of church and state -- or a stronger message to gay people as to the magnitude of the challenge to win equal rights.
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70If the impact of co-director/writer Reed Cowan's film is undercut by its sometimes sloppy execution, it nonetheless provides a disturbing portrait of the increasing overlap between church and state.
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40There’s little of the Church’s perspective in this doc, but you can’t really fault the filmmakers--Mormon leaders refused several overtures to participate. Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/86550/the-mormon-proposition-film-review#ixzz0r2j38wUF
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708 is most coherent as a chilling confirmation of both the mind-warping power of an institution like the Mormon Church and the extent to which politics is, above all, a marketing game.
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65The movie poignantly demonstrates that, 41 years after Stonewall, there are still places in this country where gay people cannot simply be themselves.
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50A deeply felt, and numbingly partisan, documentary about how the Mormon Church both bankrolled and masterminded passage of the initiative.
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50The flaws pale against what's illustrated, which is not just how Prop. 8 passed, but the sordid, cynical workings of our political machine.
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50The interviews throughout are the best part of the movie - the least heavy-handed, yet most effective, element. There is a message here of the necessity for tolerance, but 8: The Mormon Proposition would have been better had its makers presented it in a more consistent, artful fashion.
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70For sympathetic outsiders, on the other hand, it covers a lot of ground in a short space, not always in the most organized way, but on enough fronts to spark an informed dialogue.
User score distribution:
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Negative: 2 out of 6
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BenJ.8
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Adam0
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WesleyC.10