'Angels in America'miniseries about AIDS(Roy Cohn,Reagan,Mormons,gay fantasia)

You know you're in for a grand odyssey when you embark on "Angels in America." The epic six-hour flight is composed of two parts, the first showing on HBO at 8 p.m. Sunday and the second set for Dec. 14.

The first view is intoxicating. You sail above cotton-candy clouds drifting over San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge; it feels like heaven, until the clouds clear and we're staring down at the gray Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. We cruise next past the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and end up in New York City, where we meet the five people with whom we'll become intimate over the next three hours.

It's hot, it's humid and it's irresistible. Tony Kushner's adaptation of his Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play is easily the most absorbing story to hit any screen, big or small, in a long time. Director Mike Nichols deploys a dream team of actors: Emma Thompson as the Angel, among other characters; Al Pacino as the devil, specifically Reagan crony Roy Cohn; Mary-Louise Parker as Harper, a Valium-gulping Mormon housewife; Patrick Wilson as her porcelain husband, Joe; and Meryl Streep as his Mormon mama. In a concurrent plot line, Justin Kirk and Ben Shenkman are Prior Walter and Louis, lovers ripped asunder by the AIDS virus. Jeffrey Wright also mesmerizes in two roles: Belize, a nurse and friend of Prior Walter, and Mr. Lies, a figment of Harper's hallucinations.

The movie is about AIDS in 1985, closeted gay men and the currents of hate swirling around them. Though set during the Reagan years and subtitled "Millennium Approaches," the story is not stale. That's because it is also about the power - and the necessity - of unconditional love.

"Angels" is a seething masterwork of political drama, but it works on an intensely personal level. By the halfway point, we care about the two couples as if they are family. To say they're dysfunctional would be an understatement - but that's what makes us relate to them deeply.

Kushner's characters, like most of us, struggle to live their lives according to narratives they had all mapped out: If I do this, then this, then this, I'll be happy. I've found a life partner, we're doing our darnedest to make it work, so we deserve some peace.

In come the forces of intolerance. The world's going crazy around us, in ways we couldn't have anticipated. Power-ravenous people such as Roy Cohn and Ronald Reagan - according to Kushner - rewrite the rules to fit their appetites. They poison the environment, placing their personal clout above any kind of human connection they might have created with family or life partners.

Pacino is by turns terrifying and pathetic as the Reaganite with AIDS. His opposite is Joe, the beautiful blond Mormon who believed he could quash his homosexuality if he prayed hard enough. The camera drinks in his and Harper's faces, until we're swimming in their tormented eyes. That's something television can do that theatrical productions of "Angels" cannot: The extreme close-up that provides a look inside a character's soul.

Kushner's dialogue devastates even as it howls with humor. Certain bits summarize the scenes, while relieving the gravity of the situation like magic pills.

"We're happy enough," Harper says to Joe. "Pretend happy; it's better than nothing."

In Prior Walter's hospital room, nurse Emily (played by Thompson) asks Louis, "Are you his, uh ...?" He replies, deadpan, "Yes, I'm his uh."

Kushner has his characters sum up his recollections of the Reagan years: Cohn's doctor (James Cromwell), says, "Sometimes the body even attacks itself," while Cohn himself is more blunt: "This is not a good world," he tells Joe, in an effort to bring his protégé down to his level.

Joe, by rejecting his true nature, already put himself in his own region of hell. So has Louis, by abandoning his lover. He says he wants to be with Prior Walter, but can't summon the strength to stay at his side.

Meantime, Cohn carries on as a ringleader in the Reagan circus. We can only imagine how the current Bush administration, with its unfulfilled promises of help for AIDS-afflicted Africa and its stance against gay marriage, would fare if Kushner unleashed his wrath upon it. The playwright recently told The New York Times that he's determined to put Bush out in 2004.

The movie makes use of grand pullbacks over New York City, periodically widening our perspective. By contrast, the interior scenes, such as one inside Joe and Harper's kitchen, wrench us into the characters' inner anguish.

There's Harper, desperate to get past her husband's prim facade. She rattles around the apartment all day, leaving the refrigerator and oven doors open. Joe comes home and closes them carefully, trying to defuse the household's imminent implosion.

Then we come around a corner and see the characters transcend, for a moment, their earthly suffering. They do it by connecting with and accepting each other. Prior Walter, in one such moment, stops writhing in his sickbed long enough to have his role as a prophet affirmed by a pair of ancestors. It is at these points of acceptance, of comprehension, that heaven comes down, like a shaft of light, to Earth. When an individual understands his connection to the universe, that's the moment at which the Angel appears.

Overwrought? Yes, oh, yes. "Angels in America" is refreshingly high drama. It's nothing less than a trip to heaven and hell, with a motley and fascinating crew of travelers.

Yeah, when Reagan wasn't busy making and distributing crack in the inner cities, he was busy infecting innocent gays while they slept alone, by themselves, in their beds at home. He got around pretty well for an old guy!

You couldn't pay me to watch "Angels in America". Not enough money in the world! The only thing worse than it on TV would be to actually sit through the play - which was much longer - I think I heard 8 hours! What a bunch of crap!

But you can search long and hard, and in vain, to find one critical or negative review. The gay SS in Hollywood would slam anyone that dare speak out and call this drek for what it is.

Has anyone thought about writing a play about how Clinton did nothing while bin Laden was killing Americans and plotting 9/11 - and also while CEOs were getting away with fraud on an unprecedented level? And tie it all to the fact that Clinton just didn't care about anything and was the typical baby-boomer and only cared about himself and power, the rest was just for show. "Asleep at the Wheel" is what I will call it - unless anyone comes up with a better name.

Come on my fellow freepers, (keeping it clean!) come up with the name for the Broadway play chronicling the eight years this country had the Rodham/Clintons running the show. Methinks it a far more deserving topic than how Ronald Reagan gave all the gays the AIDS.

I'm watching this problematic presentation right now. One thing that I found disconcerting was that during the advertising that lead up to this show, the title "Angels in America" was played up over a visual of an angel poised mid-air. The graphic was a riviting portrayal of an angel, something that led me to believe that perhaps this was going to be an uplifting movie about angels and their intercession in our lives.

Like so many other times before, this is another instance of the homosexual community and their appologists taking an icon that is dear to the average person, then doing their damndest to destory it's pristene beauty.

Conservatives, read that Republican operatives, are made to look as disgusting as is humanly possible. Not satisfied to just trash Ronald Reagan, the children of Ronald Reagan are mentioned as people needing pitty due to their father's incredible outlook on life and ineptitude. Conservatives are the real culprits here, their actions always under scrutiny. No one else is revealed to be in need of second-guessing their life choices.

Republican actions dating back to the Rosenbergs are connected to Republican operatives, the intent being that they should be held accountable or at least blamed.

This show slips in and out of reality on a number of levels. The halucinations or dream-state sequences are perhaps the least of these. The moments portrayed as reality are as problematic or more troubling than them. This is one twisted self-agrandizing presentation. It can only be appreciated by the 1-2% of the populace that considers itself to be homosexual. The straight community knows better than to take what is being presented as gospel. It's fantasy of the highest order.

My personal beliefs regarding homosexuality aside, I do not dwell on the appropriate nature of homosexuality. I prefer to leave God to his judgement of what is appropriate or not, on behalf of humans. When I run into homosexuals in my daily life, I try to respect them. I do not pretend to know what God truly thinks of them. I figure I have my own set of problems, and I should worry about them.

It is unfortunate that the media in this nation has decided to make homosexuality their cause celeb. If it didn't, I wouldn't confront this issue nearly as much, and that would benefit homosexuals far more than my having ot dwell on the issue.

There are many heterosexual facts of life I do not wish to be passed on to younger humans. It is therefore dismaying to watch what the media seems intent on portraying to them on behalf of appologists for homosexuality.

I look at today's media and can only guess how bad things will be by 2020. Frankly, that thought is startling.

The demonification of Ronald Reagan is very closely linked with the emptiness of the Gay Agenda. All they care about is themselves and promoting (not protecting, since no
one is attacking them) their precious "life style". In Angels in America, as in nearly all stories involving gays (with the notable exception of the gay brother in the Fisher
family in Six Feet Under), their whole universe revolves around their own stinking sexuality. No other issue matters. Nothing about America matters, other than whether
or not its religiously respectful of the "life-style".

Science doesn't matter, except how it impacts on AIDS. Politics doesn't matter, except how it impacts on "gay rights". International politics don't exist, because then the whole subject of how horribly gays are treated in Islamic dictatorships would have to be addressed. And since that would involve actually thinking about issues and
weighing moral principles, that issue is just completely dropped. There are no Islamic dictatorships in the universe of self-absorbtion that the gays live in. Just
as there are no other diseases but AIDS, and no other crimes but homophobia.

So where does Ronald Reagan fit in this self-obssessed universe? The answer is obvious. You can't talk about ending the Cold War, because that subject says nothing
about homophobia and AIDS and therefore doesn't exist. Likewise with re-building American capitalism. The only subjects that matter in the universe --- gay rights and
AIDS --- are the only yardstick for measuring any human being on earth. And by that yardstick --- according to their own internal spin machine --- Reagan failed.

I lived through the 80s and I followed these issues with some interest, including the issue of AIDS. I remember the early days, when no one knew what the cause of the immune-system breakdown was. It was interesting to read the science in the New York Times and Scientific American as the doctors and researches went after this big epidemiological mystery and following the gradual solution of the puzzle in the news, as the virus was finally discovered and a blood test was developed.

I remember other aspects of the story too. I remember that Reagan was criticized for moving too slowly and that when William F Buckley defended Reagan by saying that
Reagan's slowness to react didn't translate into many deaths, since the early years had fewer deaths anyway, he was displaying a bit of innumeracy that showed his
confusion about how these expanding numbers work.

And I do think that Reagan acted somewhat slowly on the issue. But let's consider everything that was going on at the time, shall we? Let's consider that Reagan was
busy bringing down the Soviet Union and may have been a tad preoccupied. And lets also consider what the gays themselves were doing. All through this epidemic, and into the late 80s, the reporters in Gay communities publicly admitted that these people --- large numbers of these people --- were having sex with up to 1000 different partners a year! These guys --- who didn't give a rats patoot about the Soviet Union and the 50 million people it killed and the fact that Reagan was bringing that Evil Empire to an end --- were busy butt-humping each other at the rate of 1000 partners (strangers) a year.

This incredible statistic is totally forgotten today. You won't see it in the movie The Reagans (which is all about the Gay Agenda and nothing about the Soviet Union) and you want see it in Angels in America, which shows a gay couple in a monogamous relationship, which, if you believe the gay reporters who were writing in the 80s, was about as common then as a Conservative in Hollywood is today.

Let's get this straight: the gays were going to bath-houses all through the epidemic, not using condoms, not listening to the news, not reading the New York Times or Scientific American, not ceasing for a second their relentless butt-pounding hard work at spreading this VIRUS through the HUMAN COMMUNITITY... and yet, it's all REAGAN'S FAULT.

As Larry Elders would say... incredible.

When I run into homosexuals in my daily life, I try to respect them.

Same here. I do not walk around holding a grudge against homosexuals-as-homosexuals, and until their most recent political exploits (most notably, the whole Gay Marriage initiative) I really didn't give them much thought at all.

But I'll tell you, I'm coming to really detest their political agenda and their propaganda machine. In some ways they are more disgusting than the left, with whom they seem to be mere allies of convenience. What issues do the gays care about outside their own gayness? I've never heard them express any interest in anything other than that.

It's true, Angels in America does through a sop to the left with the deification of Ethel Rosenberg. But I think that's just a sop. The average busy-bee butt-humping gay doesn't know or care who Ethel Rosenberg was.

At least the leftists believe the crap they spin about the environment and socialism. In the gay universe, there is no envirornment or socialism. There is only butt-humping, and those who protect it.

It's not the butt-humping itself that I object to (frankly, as long as there are no children involved, they can engage in shite-eating for all I care), but the politicalization of it, and their disgusting propaganda effort. I'm actually coming to truly detest them. Not for their "life style", but for their lying narcissitic politics.

Just as Christians were worried about Harry Potter saying the problem was witchcraft .. there is a more insidious message in those movies.

Harry Potter seems to (fudge)pack the double whammy, witchcraft and homosexuality (or even just the latter), to hear some perv activist nitwits tell it:

Children aren’t the only ones who love Harry Potter. The members of NAMBLA are big fans, too — and a long article touted on the home page of the controversial group’s Web site puts forth the argument that the boy wizard is gay.

“Of course Harry is gay,” argues a quasi-academic essay there, which comes complete with 55 footnotes. “He grew up in a closet under the stairs. . . . At school Harry learns to fly, and meets the lovely red-headed Ron Weasley; fairy-boy and tight companion.”

The essay draws on historic and literary references, comparing, for example, Potter’s story with Orestes of Greek mythology. “Orestes, like Harry, was born at Lammas, sent away to be reared by relatives, had a lightening-flash birthmark on his forehead, caused the death of his parents, fought unending magic battles, had a marriage of convenience with Hermione, and was life-long lover of his childhood boyfriend Pylades. In ancient times the Orestes-Pylades story was regarded as the paradigm of masculine love, they were the perfect poofs, and given the continuing coincidence with Harry’s story [author] J.K. Rowling cannot be ignorant of this.”

A spokeswoman for Harry Potter’s publisher did not return calls for comment. MSNBC

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