Synopsis wrote:
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 »
Synopsis
Last Days is filmmaker Gus Van Sant’s fictional meditation on the inner turmoil that engulfs a brilliant, but troubled musician in the final hours of his life. Michael Pitt (The Dreamers, Hedwig and The Angry Inch) stars as Blake, an introspective artist whose success has left him in a lonely place, where livelihoods rest on his shoulders, and old friends regularly tap him for money and favors. Last Days follows Blake through a handfull of hours he spends in and near his wooded home, a fugitive from his own life. Expanding on the elliptical style forged in his previous two films, Gerry and the Palme d’Or winning Elephant, Van Sant layers images and sounds to articulate an emotional landscape creating a dynamic work about a soul in transition.Read More »
Synopsis wrote:
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 »
Cinepad.com wrote:
The deadpan comic buzz you get from Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy is practically narcotic. The movie heightens your senses and mildly anaesthetizes them at the same time, like a potent mixture of stimulants and depressants. One of the most invigoratingly original American comedies since Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Drugstore Cowboy follows druggie, irregular rhythms all its own. Whether in a heavy-lidded daze or wired with giddy, post-high paranoia, Drugstore Cowboy displays an uncanny alertness to detail and texture — yellow-white bus headlights that barely penetrate the slate-grey, late-afternoon gloom on a rain-drenched north-western road; the surreal surge of blood into a hypodermic syringe as it enters a vein in intensified close-up… But the film’s vibrant aliveness to such minute sensations is submerged beneath a cold, clammy complexion: the blue-grey pallor of a day-old corpse.Read More »