I thought Milk was nothing really special. Naturally, a nice job by Sean Penn (actually Emile Hirsch might have been his equal, though in a much smaller role) and the filmmakers generally but nothing resonated and it felt like I've seen this type of film and especially this type of acting job before. The intensity and call-to-arms nature of the story (Sara: "I am going to make you be a gay rights activist") propels it to a definitely good film, but I can't say you really need to spend $12.50 to see this unless you are really looking forward to it (which is what I am for Revolutionary Road, thanks to seeing its preview prior to Milk).

Now, what I've really come to write about today is sports. Specifically, college football, which would seem a timely subject as its national championship game is to be played tonight.
It's taken 28 years for me to be able to say this, but I really am done with the bowl system. I get virtually nothing out of the bowls anymore. Ohio State just played a close, exciting game against Texas a few days ago, and I never really felt like what I was watching mattered. I haven't watched very many other bowl games this year, because they don't matter either. And even if they did, how seriously should we take them if the teams competing have gone usually at least 5 weeks since last playing, after having spent the previous 3 months playing games no more than two weeks apart.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The whole bowl system is a ridiculously out-of-date relic, and the fact that everyone forces today's college football into a structure built 50, 60, 70-plus years ago is absurd. Roads we use today are much bigger and smoother than those used in 1925. The technology of cars and the complexity of the advanced transportation systems demanded it. In 1940 it was a big deal for a Big Ten and its fan base to win a bid to the Rose Bowl. It gave midwesterners a chance to travel to warm southern California, and it gave warm southern California an injection of tourism that it may not have always enjoyed. From the team's perspective, it allowed two very disparate but powerful football regions to pit their best teams against one another in glorified exhibition games (remember the long layoff between games, then multiply that by great magnitudes to reflect that teams didn't practice as ubiquitously as they do now). Remember now that the sport itself was still rather young back then and so the notion of exhibition games was not at all silly. They needed to get their product out in front of people however possible, and so grandly scheduled (New Year's Day) games featuring presumably the best teams was good for business.
Does any of that last paragraph sound remotely relevant to college football today? No. Teams travel across the country multiple times per year anyway. They don't truly get the time off between late November and January 1 either, so the 5+ week gap between games is contrived. I don't need to tell you that air travel is now commonplace so people will travel to warm southern California, sometimes just on a whim, and certainly whether their favorite team is going there or not. TV has given the sport a spotlight every weekend through the season, and the aforementioned big inter-sectional matchups through the fall command at least as much attention as bowl games ever did.
Assuming you follow reason you agree with me now, that there is no need for bowl games to exist in 2009 as they once did. So then what's the point? The way I see it, the only thing bowls really achieve today is to stand in the way of a playoff, something that would both make sense and have consequence.
I won't get into the endless debate about the pros and cons of a playoff, especially the financial aspect of the argument, but I will say that, from a competitive standpoint, a playoff is really the only solution. If you are one who feels that it would diminish the importance of the regular season (something I disagree with, and something I feel could easily be mitigated by structuring the playoff properly), then just choose your champion at the end of the regular season. Or, if you absolutely must, run the BCS like they do now and select just two teams to play for the title. But don't do it in conjunction with any bowl, and don't do it 5 weeks later. Remember that the current setup technically is a playoff, simply a two-team playoff. Everything else is consolation. Consolation that loses value and interest every year. This year, I think it lost me. Tradition for its own sake is preposterous.