Gus Van Sant

Footage from My Own Private Idaho (1991) is re-contextualized in James Franco’s tribute to River Phoenix.Read More »

With its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, Gus Van Sant’s debut feature Mala Noche heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film. Set in Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, the film evokes a world of transient workers, dead-end day-shifters, and bars and seedy apartments bathed in a profound nighttime, as it follows a romantic deadbeat with a wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant. Mala Noche was an important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and is a fascinating capsule from a time and place that continues to haunt its director’s work.Read More »

A group of drug addicts in the 1970’s help finance their habit by robbing drug stores. A highly superstitious Bob and wife Diane love to do various pharmaceutical drugs like dilaudid, morphine and cocaine. To maintain the habit, they steal from pharmacies with the help of another couple. A cop that eventually gets too close for comfort, which causes the crew to move their operation to another town. Before long, one of the crew dies of an overdose; the body has to be moved from their hotel room to their car. The problem is that there is an unexpected sheriff’s convention assembling at the hotel where they’re staying. Bob believes that one of his superstitious beliefs caused this incident and is scared into joining a methadone program. Leaving his past proves harder than he anticipated, though.Read More »

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An unsolved murder at Portland’s infamous Paranoid Park brings detectives to a local high school, propelling a young skater into a moral odyssey in which he must not only deal with the pain and disconnect of adolescence but also the consequences of his own actions.Read More »

Two men named Gerry are driving through the desert regions of Death Valley, traveling towards an unknown destination. They pull over and set out on foot, presuming they’re getting close to what they’ve come to find…Read More »

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Structured in elegantly fluid and elliptically interconnected episodes from a roving, multiple student point-of-view, Elephant is an incisive and poetic, yet relevant and deeply disturbing portrait of the unfolding of a fictional, modern-day high school massacre in suburban America. Van Sant presents a richly textured and complexly interwoven series of mundane student interactions and astute slice-of-life observations (except for a scene of sexual experimentation between the plotters that seems improbably out of character) that are intrinsically linked together through long and sinuous tracking shots of the school’s cold and impersonal labyrinthine corridors and rooms. Inevitably, what emerges is a profound sense of alienation and the oppressive, inescapable, and moribund institutionalization of its adrift and desperate characters.Read More »

It’s hardly an earthshaking revelation that we live in a culture where fame (or its cheaper companion, notoriety) is the secular equivalent of sainthood. But “To Die For,” Gus Van Sant and Buck Henry’s brilliant satire, makes that discovery seem like a clarion call from the heavens or—more appropriately—a rock-’em, sock-’em TV sound bite.

Henry’s script, based on Joyce Maynard’s novel, is assured, sophisticated and mercilessly glutted with funny zingers. Van Sant’s fluid, subtly wicked direction is a personal redemption of sorts; he’s the one responsible for the legendarily abysmal “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” But what gives the movie its sharpest, sweetest edge is Nicole Kidman.Read More »

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Non-normative texts concern themselves with subject matter that is marginalized, or not widely accepted as “normal.” Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho – an ode to the abandoned, and the isolated – is an example. It’s an exercise in brilliant directorial innovation, and cinematic ingenuity – required viewing for the capsized, fissure-ridden heart.

The film offers up a discourse on the fragility, and the emotional and intellectual convolution, of children who are left with the burden of trying to understand why their parents have abandoned them. This search becomes obdurate and lost, in the cases of Mike Waters (a physical and emotional narcoleptic, played to perfection by River Phoenix), and Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves); Mike is subverted by an idyllic yearning for the past, while Scott is consumed by familial regret and rebellion.Read More »

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The short film was made from material shot for a Levi’s commercial on which Gus Van Sant was given complete freedom. Van Sant delivered the ad, and separately made his own short film; one that feels complete in and unto itself. The stunning, natural-lit frames are the result of what might be the filmmaker’s first collaboration with his long-time collaborator, the much revered, and sadly passed, cinematographer Harris Savides. The pair later worked together on all of Van Sant’s features from Gerry (2002) to Restless (2011). In Four Boys in a Volvo, repeating images of a car driving through a desert road remind us of Van Sant’s later films Gerry or Last Days (2005). This elliptical film conveys one of the filmmaker’s most beloved themes; a portrait of youth in search of meaning and escape.Read More »