Gus Van Sant

on paper there's lots to despise (ie. warm tones and elliott smith soundtrack predates/predicts fetal rock/emo boom, robin williams in maudlin mode, "how dya like them apples", its launching of the hydraheaded damon/affleck monster) but in practice i found it well-written, capably-acted and surprisingly engrossing. the funny thing is that i can't remember a single person disliking this film when it came out, and now i'd have a hard time finding anyone who rates it. has your relationship with it changed? and if so, why?

In short, it's an honorable mainstream hit. I don't get some of the hate it inspires.

was this considered a mainstream film at the time of its release? williams aside, none of the actors were particularly well-known.

mainstream = 2 Oscars

how was the "it's not your fault" scene fraudulent?

Same here, kinda. I did see it again a few years ago and still liked it.

was this considered a mainstream film at the time of its release? williams aside, none of the actors were particularly well-known.

There was a bit of buzz. I specifically remember my mom was watching an Oprah that featured Matt and Ben (and maybe Williams?) talking about GWH around the time of the release and she called me into the room to watch it, because she thought I might find it interesting.

Now, if the performances move you, that's a matter of taste.

Alfred OTM, my understanding is that psychotherapy doesn't have "one-moment cures" like that. (I'm an Irish Catholic who embraces his guilt, so I've never tried it.) It's the equivalent of the"A-HA!" moment in artist biopics, where he discovers his style.

xp

Quite so. I vividly remember during the Titanic box office lockdown that Good Will and As Good As It Gets were the top two and three films for many weeks.

It imitates every psychoanalyst-patient relationship filmed by Hollywood

every single one? even what about bob? an incredible achievement!

my understanding is that psychotherapy doesn't have "one-moment cures" like that.

you're right! but only because psychotherapy doesn't preach "cures", period. or at least not in my experience. a better suited term might be "breakthrough". these tend to happen very fraudulently, sometimes in single moments, thanks to generous forces of accumulated pressure and/or anguish.

Robin Williams doing Dr Judd Hirsch, genius janitor who looks great shirtless gets the girl ... the triumph of this movie is that it was well-crafted enough not to get laughed off the screen.

I've never seen "Bob?" but I certainly prefer my shrink movies to be comedies.

'fraudulent' in relation to what? your experience? or everyone's?

Remember the next scene? Damon finally decies to Wise Up, abandoning his buddy to Follow His Dreams.

you were expecting him to stay in boston... ? and if he were to leave, would you rather it were apropos of absolutely nothing? or is an action causing a reaction too 'hollywood'?

(xpost)

http://us.movies1.yimg.com/movies.yahoo.com/images/hv/photo/movie_pix/miramax_films/good_will_hunting/_group_photos/matt_damon7.jpg

it's funny, at the top of the thread it's all 'argh sell-out!' gvs has now 'gone back to his roots. does he now seem 'less fraudulent'?

hahaha otm!

Gira is really branching out.

love diane lane

and chloeeeeee my heart

Two episodes in. The performances are uniformly good, with so much opportunity for caricature. Enjoying the score, too--kind of new-agey classical. (Didn't get the Michael Gira joke above at first, so I checked to see if he'd done it...)

Flashing back to the '66 ball for the third episode was a great idea. Like a lot of people it seems, my first question was whether or not this Maysles Brothers film exists. Yes, sort of:

http://mayslesfilms.com/film/with-love-from-truman/

There was a book a few years ago about the ball that I read; truly fascinating snapshot of a moment.

https://www.vulture.com/article/gus-van-sant-feud-truman-capote-black-and-white-ball-interview.html

Watched the first ep and at least so far GVS is in for-hire mode here. Can't overcome the Ryan Murphy-ness of it all

Didn't like E4 as much as the first three, but I think two great performances are emerging. I love Capote and PSH--almost a comfort movie for me--but I think Tom Hollander might be even better, or at the very least benefits from his comparative anonymity. (PSH is such a presence for me, I don't think I can ever stop being entirely aware it's him.) And Naomi Watts is someone for whom I've always had an arm's-length appreciation, but I think she's so good here.

episode 3 was pretty great

the way GVS recreated the Maysles style was so good, esp since there never was Maysles footage of the ball or anything! the only thing they ever did together irl was just a very short reel of interview w Truman in long island apparently

the ball looked amazing, and the side by side scenes of truman dancing alone then w his mother was so good

havent seen ep4 yet

E3 was a classic self-contained episode--I think you could enjoy it without watching the rest of the series.

Watts plays Babe Paley. The real-life version:

https://i.postimg.cc/vHYZfdXZ/babe.jpg

Wasn't 100% sure whether this week's episode was the last--it could've worked as the finale, although they would have needed a written postscript. (Which I'm sure will be part of any finale.) Anyway, two more, next one directed by Jennifer Lynch. Thought E5 and E6 were both pretty good, although E3 is still the highlight so far. Getting "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" in there was nice.

Thought Capaote's drunken TV appearance in E7 was the series' worst scene--accurate, maybe, but overracted--but the Babe Paley stuff, especially their conversation on Truman's deathbed, was very good. Intrigued as to how they'll handle Dead Truman in E8; hope they don't get overly clever.

yeah the babe/truman scenes were great & agree abt the drunk tv

i love this show but there’s also something about it that i find a little boring?
idk what it is

I guess it's that there's not really a lot of room for surprises. Truman drinks, Truman tries to finish the book, and that's about it (and we know the ending already). I loved the ending of E7, the way it led to the last line. Hope Tom Hollander and Naomi Watts win Emmys--I take it there's a separate category for this kind of show?

Try as I might, I can't really find Truman Capote a particularly interesting historical figure

i think limited series? idk abt such things

but yeah Watts & Hollander are incredible. also like Sevigny too

not a fan of Ringwald in this tho? her performance feels very strained somehow

Agree--she just seems wrong. Weird to watch Treat Williams play the husband of a dying woman, knowing he died himself after making this.

yeah it’s nice seeing him in this

oh you know who i love in this? Calista Flockhart - her Lee Radziwll is really good, very arch & shady

and Demi was excellent her small role

I like both of them. I'm a little on the fence with Sevigny, probably because her performance is so different from what I'm used to with her.

Holly Golightly = Carol Matthau...I guess that's true? Hard to picture Walter Matthau married to the Holly Golightly of the movie.

oh huh i didn’t know that!

matthau irl seems too curmudgeonly to tolerate a golightly but there you go
there’s someone for everyone i guess

Wait, what? I just came across her name elsewhere.

Regarding Glenn Close's performance in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical adaptation of Sunset Boulevard.

Close modeled Norma’s grotesque look on Walter Matthau’s wife, Carol. Close didn’t know her, but she’d heard that when Carol was young she had porcelain skin. As she got older, she applied white makeup to her face, which made her look odd, even a little frightening. “But I’m sure when she looked in the mirror she saw that porcelain skin,” Close said. “Norma’s makeup morphed into something grotesque. But she was seeing something different in the mirror. She was seeing what she looked like in the 1920s.”

Riedel, Michael. Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway (pp. 20-21). Simon & Schuster

You hope for a strong finale; thought this one meandered, so I'll knock the series down a notch overall. They should have ended with E7.

I did like the very ending though, the last five minutes and the final shot. I don't know if that young couple bidding had special significance--I thought something was going to be revealed about them, but no. Love that bit of music at the end, which played throughout the series.

The ending was of a piece with the Black and White Ball. I think I find that so interesting because it feels like the last time that glamour and celebrity still largely belonged to people over 40 (pick whatever number you want--50 maybe). From '67 forward, that changed.

I watched the whole thing thinking Answered Prayers was eventually published in more or less its finished form. I guess not, although the version published in 1986 is 180 pages long.

Drugstore Cowboy is on Prime.

Did Lana Del Rey steal like 99% of her look from Kelly Lynch in this movie?

lol

My two favourite Gus Van Sant films are at opposite ends of his one-for-me, one-for-them filmography: Elephant, which concedes nothing to the thousand obvious ways to tell that story (took me two or three viewings to realize how great it is), and The Promised Land, possibly my favourite old-fashioned mainstream film this century, and which may as well have been directed by Ron Howard.

Dead Man's Wire is tilted heavily in the one-for-them direction.* I liked it, though it looks like not as rapturously as the reviews (and not as much as The Promised Land). The trailer, which I'd seen a couple of times, made me think Michael Shannon was the lead actor. I wish he had been; I found Bill Skarsgård a little rote, or too earnest, or something. Thought Dacre Montgomery was very good as the kidnapped son, and while I flinched the first time Pacino spoke--big accent--he's good too. Van Sant clearly loves Dog Day Afternoon and The China Syndrome, and now he's made his own version.

Assuming I could look up a complete list of songs when I got home, I left when the last bit of real footage played. Nothing online yet, so I can't identify this one song I liked. Some good '70s stuff throughout. "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" fell a little flat for me--that one's owned by another film. (I'm probably the only person here who wants songs to be a surprise.)

*I don't know if directors like Van Sant still have the luxury of one-for-me, one-for-them.

it's his best since Milk, a solid mainstream film. The interpolation of photos and film -- a tic since Mala Noche -- felt like an imposition this time, a reminder of artier times.

Pacino's broadness would've oppressed me had his role been bigger; in his small doses he made he chuckle several times, especially when he maliciously relishes how his kid doesn't cry but Skarsgard toes.

OTM

My impression is that every script Gus gets interested in directing gets shopped the same way, and certain of them get big budget greenlit, and other's get small budget greenlit, and the production and resultant film are adjusted accordingly toward expectations of the investors. I was adjacent to the pre-production of Milk, and at the time, many years having passed since Good Will Hunting (and Finding Forrester), it wasn't even clear to anyone involved in the early stages if the film was going to be a glossy one or an arty one. Then the money came through and the big names got hired.

Interesting! Not as pre-determined as I thought. Follow the money...

Tbh thought Pacino was only in this as a nod to Dog Day Afternoon.

In any case it totally worked for me as a gritty seventies callback/throwback/wayback tribute with a groovy period soundtrack.

xp I don't think it's so much "follow the money" as Gus's place in the industry requires him, oftentimes, to "play ball"; his films typically don't make a tonne of money. It does perplex/frustrate me that Gus hasn't even come close to getting a $5m budget for any of his own scripts since "Even Cowgirls..."; in comparison, Woody Allen has consistently been getting between $20m and $40m this century, even recently, but... Allen's films tend to make money. God knows why.

woody is coasting on his rep among those for whom his rep is positive. plus. he still attracts talented actors who think working with him will polish their own reps

xps Van Sant did a few Q&A's for this film and I attended one. He didn't start this film, the producers initiated it and originally had Werner Herzog set to direct, but at some point, Herzog dropped out and Elwes approached Van Sant (who he already knew) about taking his place. I'm not sure how much of the decision-making was already done, but they did tell him it was already set up to shoot in Louisville (even though it didn't take place there) which actually appealed to him because he was born there (though he didn't grow up there). Pacino was already cast by the producers with the stipulation that they had to shoot all his scenes in one day. But IIRC Dacre Montgomery was cast by Van Sant himself (I think he auditioned and Van Sant picked him on the basis of that). It sounded like he basically had to jump in and hit the ground running because they were going to shoot fairly soon, so it all had to come together very fast. At least some of the music was not chosen by him - "Raindrops" for example was a favorite song of one producer and he licensed it even before Van Sant was involved, so he basically had to use it for that reason. I thought the film was okay. It's far from his best work, but at least it wasn't terrible.

FWIW, the ones I like best (i.e. absolutely love) are his early shorts, Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, and Elephant. I’ve been meaning to revisit Paranoid Park and Last Days, I had reservations before but I may appreciate them more now. To Die For and Milk are fine, I enjoy them mostly for the performances. But everything I’ve seen by him from the last 17 years hasn’t done much for me. He had a hell of a run to start his career and it was a much better time for a filmmaker like him to get things made, so I don’t blame him if he doesn’t have it in him to do anything more than director-for-hire work. He’s 73 now and he’s earned his laurels.

Look, Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho ? Stupendous run. MOPI is often my favorite film, period. But To Die For is a splendid comedy, especially when it concentrates on the kids; and Milk does something similar with Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, and their crew as they strategize about politics. Elephant and Paranoid Park hold up.

In addition to everything else it has going for it, MOPI has an excellent use of Udo Keir.

We should film club this guy— it’s been years since I watched that first run and he’s due

In addition to everything else it has going for it, MOPI has an excellent use of Udo Keir.

One of the pleasures of those early films was how even the smaller roles were brilliantly conceived and cast. Kier's role is one example, but I especially loved Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy. I first saw the movie as a pre-teen who wasn't that familiar with Burroughs, but with the benefit hindsight, it's really impressive how that was done with such confidence and ease from someone who was making only his second feature - still an indie production too albeit the first one that wasn't a microbudget DIY production.

All of those early shorts appear to be scattered across different releases. Could be a rights issue, but would be nice if someone properly restored them all and collected them in one release.