2 posts tagged “gus van sant”
Paranoid Park is at once a hollow non-event and a completely entrancing piece of thing. Gus Van Sant's latest meditation on beautiful young people doing awful things or having awful things done to them really had its way with me, much more so than his similarly oblique Elephant.
The pretty boy here is Gabe Nevins, who has a face that's as emotive as a Staples catalog. But that's the whole point. The non-performances that Van Sant is able to coax from his young actors are always much more effective than the alternative, anyway.
Nevins is Alex, a pubescent skateboarder, and a cypher upon whom his parents project the guilt they feel over their divorce, his girlfriend projects her desire to cross the sex barrier, and his little brother projects his need to talk about Napoleon Dynamite. But who is Alex? What does he want? Just to be left alone with his skateboard, it seems. Van Sant cuts around a central traumatic event that Alex is running from. Something unspeakable happened at the skateboard park of the film's title, and Alex becomes even more of a blank slate than he was before as details eke slowly from Van Sant's cubist construction. (I know there's actually an accepted definition of film cubism, and that's not what I'm talking about).
While another director would probably have focused on fleshing out "the skateboard community", the very notion seems antithetical to these boys' existence. It's an idea laughed at when the investigating detective brings it up, and Van Sant does well to avoid that cliché in favor of his main character.
Christopher Doyle, the legendary DP who shot Wong Kar-Wai's In The Mood For Love and Van Sant's amazing Psycho remake, might want to think about sticking to the Pacific Northwest, because his work has rarely looked more beautiful. And that's saying something. Or at least I hope it is.
There's a lot of lovely dissonance going on, a tension created between sound and picture that, at one point, called to mind a friend's experience of seeing the last reel of 300 with a different' reel's soundtrack, something that he at first thought was an intentional move to create dialectical perfection before he realized that it was just the theater's incompetence at work. That's just a long way of saying that "the sound was weird". Whereas the use of Elliott Smith's "Angeles" in Van Sant's Good Will Hunting strikes a lot of people as cloying, employing the same song here seems like more of a comment on the use of Elliott Smith's "Angeles", and breaks all the momentum that a montage is supposed to be so good at creating. From Billy Swan's "I Can Help" to Nino Rota's Juliet of the Spirits score, the music (and use of sound as a whole, come to think of it) only serves to underscore the unsettling absence of guidance and that informs everything Paranoid Park is about.
I'm not even going to try to keep this organized. Some thoughts on Peter Jackson's King Kong:
- King Kong (1933) is, I hear, Peter Jackson's favorite movie. The concept of wanting to remake your favorite movie (or even a movie you moderately enjoy on any level) is beyond comprehension. There is no way my brain can understand the reasons that this movie was made. It reminds me of Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot Psycho remake. But Gus Van Sant is nutty, and his film was doomed both artistically and financially from its inception, so in a lot of ways it makes MORE sense.
- I kind of feel like this is a $200,000,000 piece of fan fiction.
- Digital lens flair makes me feel like the john that asked the hooker to wear his wife's pajamas.
- Peter Jackson likes a good wall. He's into walls. Big walls, ancient walls, and preferably walls that are, at one point or another, ablaze.
- My favorite movie is Seven Samurai. I think it's damn near perfect. And there's no way I would ever want to remake it. And if I were to remake it, I wouldn't set it in Japan. I would do something crazy with it and make it my own. I'd have the samurai be superheroes, and make sure it was an all baby cast. It would be called The Adorables. Don't steal that. That's my sweet sweet brain sugar flowing.
- Naomi Watts makes me want to cease MY chest-thumping, dinosaur ravaging ways as well.
- If 1933 Kong fought 2005 Kong in a cage match battle royale, 1933 Kong would win (even though he was only an 18 inch model) because he existed. 2005 Kong doesn't exist and never did.
- Man, this story would actually make an awesome 100 minute B-movie. Maybe we could remake this King Kong as a... let's see... how about they remake it as if it were actually from 1933, and even digitally correct the film so that it looks like it's from the thirties? They could even digitally animate Kong as if were a model, and CGI in some old time actors like Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot. Man, wouldn't that just be the ultimate? That would be such an improvement on the original remake. Has anybody pitched it to Peter Jackson?
- CGI has jumped the shark. Jack Black's Carl Denham is a filmmaker so passionate about shooting on location and capturing reality that he risks not only his career, but his life and the lives of his crew. "No one's going to think they're fake," he says of dinosaurs as he hand cranks his camera, fever in his eyes. And yet... aah. Does no one see the sadness of this whole affair?
