Gus Van Sant
166 connections found
Filmography
Good Will Hunting 1997 
To Die For 1995 
My Own Private Idaho 1991 
Drugstore Cowboy 1989 
Gerry 2002 
Promised Land 2012 
Milk 2008 
Elephant 2003 
Restless 2011 
Finding Forrester 2000 
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues 1994 
Psycho 1998 
Mala Noche 1987 
The Sea of Trees 2016 
Last Days 2005 
Paranoid Park 2007 
Dead Man's Wire 2026 View:
Connections, in both directions
It first entered mainstream cinema in Peter Bogdanovich's early film Targets (inspired by Charles Whitman's killing spree on the University of Texas campus in 1966), and has since been seen in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Gus Van Sant's Elephant.
For that matter, the Columbine school-shooting story was better told in Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003) and in the lesser-known Zero Day (2003).
There have been innumerable films made turning children and teens into vessels to be feared rather than fawned over (2007's " Joshua " is a recent unsung treasure), and ever since the tragic 1999 events at Columbine there have been almost as many exploring the cause-and-effect?or lack of solid answers?behind school violence (among them, 2002's unforgettable " Elephant " and 2008's " The Life Before Her Eyes ").
Films like Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” and “Beautiful Boy” explore the impact of the horrific incidences that all stem from that terrible day in Columbine in 1999.
Ramsay stays anchored enough to avoid the drifty dream of say, Gus Van Sant’s similarly-themed Elephant but still, the film is dominated by the aesthetic impulse.
Gus Van Sant's Columbine-inspired Elephant, still the best film made on the subject, sidesteps that question in favor of an attempt to find meaning in the mundane details of the event as it plays out for the victims and the perpetrators.
I can’t get away from the feeling that a lot of the negativity surrounding the movie is of the knee-jerk variety that stems from a surface similarity to Hal Ashby’s classic Harold and Maude (1971).
When the kid is nearly outed as a tourist at a stranger’s funeral, he’s saved by Wasikowska’s carefree Annabel Cotton, and a budding romance (and obvious Harold and Maude tip of the hat) is born.
In its episodic bits of quirk and whimsy, and its romantic morbidity, it's a project that smacks of film school - you can practically follow the cookie crumbs of Wes Anderson and Harold and Maude and the French New Wave.
Restless, however, is a charming weepie of a film that’s equal parts Harold and Maude and Terms of Endearment.
In Restless, a black comedy that plays like Harold and Maude lite, Mia Wasikowska and Henry Hopper are cute young lovers enraptured by thoughts of mortality and visited by a Japanese kamikaze ghost in full World War II regalia.
There's an interesting movie struggling to get out from underneath the suffocating layers of self-conscious whimsy and morbid Harold and Maude affectations permeating Gus Van Sant's Restless.
Antwone Fisher (2002)
Directed by Denzel Washington
influenced by Good Will Hunting (1997)
Plot Themes
You can easily visualize a dog-eared copy of Good Will Hunting‘s screenplay sitting next to Fisher’s typewriter as the headstrong Antwone and the savvy Davenport butt heads; during their first few sessions the former sits defiantly silent while the latter tauntingly catches up on paperwork.
Worthy, but dull drama – Washington clearly wanted to make Good Will Hunting, but has made Finding Forrester instead…
By now the "tough kid meets psychiatrist" tale is becoming a genre on its own -- "Good Will hunting," " Finding Forrester ," etc.
This story of a moody, troubled young man uncovering his past has been so cautiously paced that it not only deflates the drama of its protagonist's struggles, but opens itself up to cynicism as well: Antwone Fisher is feel-Good Will Hunting.
At first I thought that it was just the black version of Good Will Hunting, but it turned into so much more.
Psycho (1960)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced Finding Forrester (2000), Elephant (2003)
Themes
Both Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, his two most recent "mainstream" movies, dealt with damaged young males, and of course his shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho featured a fractured young fellow as its focus as well.
His remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" smacked of acceptance of Van Sant (if not his lovingly crafted remake) by the big guys on the West Coast.
Despite the hostile response to his near frame-by-frame re-creation of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Gus Van Sant doesn't seem to have shaken off his repetition compulsion.
First he Xeroxed Psycho; here he rehashes one of his own films.
After his disastrous remake of Psycho, director Gus Van Sant has returned to the terrain of his most successful film, Good Will Hunting.
Barden's central performance is as tough and honest as the film calls for, and even if a closing riff feels slightly borrowed from "Good Will Hunting," "Holler" is a solid entry in the Midwest Desolation canon.
“Holler” is so good for so long I’m even willing to forgive the disastrous ending, which is lifted nearly shot-for-shot from “Good Will Hunting,” except with Phoebe Bridgers on the soundtrack instead of Elliott Smith.
Barbara Loden’s Wanda may have inspired Riegel to try her hand at filmmaking, but it’s hard not to watch what happens on-screen without thinking about the story beats from Good Will Hunting filtered through the gritty realism of Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone .
There is an echo of Good Will Hunting , another film about a talented young person who faces economic hardship, and Riegler has no problem imitating that film’s final minutes, both in terms of resolved storylines and shot compositions.
Review: Take the aesthetic of Winter’s Bone and the scrappiness of Good Will Hunting, and you get an idea of what to expect from Holler , a solid little drama featuring a strong central performance from Barden.
The Man Who Knew Infinity (2016)
Directed by Matt Brown
influenced by Good Will Hunting (1997)
Themes Plot
Just look at “Good Will Hunting” and “A Beautiful Mind,” both of which are movies about so much more than numbers and equations.
At a very basic level, you could consider “The Man Who Knew Infinity” a historically accurate, international version of 1997's Oscar-winning “Good Will Hunting.”
But the movie, a real-life "Good Will Hunting" of sorts, suffers from being nothing like the cultural outlier Ramanujan was: It's one more respectable British biopic following a formula.
Around the time that “Good Will Hunting” came out, I had occasion to chat with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist about the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who is referenced in that film.
Not that it’s been a dealbreaker for “Good Will Hunting,” “A Beautiful Mind,” and “The Imitation Game,” among others.
The visual portrayal and understanding of a subject of this kind is usually accompanied by a sub-plot and a story which eventually brings us closer to the protagonist – Matt Damon's sessions with Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting come to mind.
Along with the photographer William Eggleston and filmmaker Alan Clarke (whose 1989 TV film on Irish sectarian violence gave Elephant its title), the veteran American documentarian is cited by Van Sant as a major influence.
Filmed in long, languorous travelling shots (like Van Sant's Gerry, it's influenced by Béla Tarr, as well as the Alan Clarke film about sectarian murders from which the director took his title), sometimes slowing almost imperceptibly to savour a fleeting emotion, Elephant sucks us into the lives of some half dozen students.
The title comes from Alan Clarkes 1989 BBC short "Elephant," which is about school violence in Northern Ireland; Clarke is alluding to the saying that such a problem is as easy to ignore as an elephant in a living room.
It's ironic, perhaps, that shortly after Elephant's initial limited release in the States, Columbine authorities released a long sat-on videotape of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, with a couple of friends, target-practicing off in the woods.
Martin is basically Robin Williams’ character in Good Will Hunting, in other words, in the first of several echoes of that film.
Following in the footsteps of Good Will Hunting, Matthews, like Gus Van Sant, crafts strong compositions and effective montages to externalize the internal emotions of his characters while the story’s mix of social realism, humor and drama recall the best works of Stephen Frears.
Call it a dumbed-down Good Will Hunting .
Instead, the second act finds the film briefly paying homage to Good Will Hunting as Mary taps away on a chalkboard thrice her height in a certain unnamed Boston-based university.
The filmmakers seem well aware of the long tradition of movies about troubled but exceptional young minds, from “Little Man Tate” to “Good Will Hunting.”
The secretly-brilliant blue collar beer-drinker needs a more compelling differentiation from someone like the lead in Good Will Hunting to stand on his own, but he mainly exists as a nexus for the various arms of the plot.
In this case, the genius is a gifted natural, kind of like Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting,” only a lot younger.
It’s essentially Good Will Hunting meets Kramer Vs.
Many of the scenes occur simultaneously and certain moments cross over from one scene to the next; Gus Van Sant, a fan of Tarr's, tried the same technique on a much smaller scale in his Elephant (2003).
From Tarr's Satantango (1994) comes a complicated overlapping time structure that repeats the same events from a variety of viewpoints, seen mainly in extended takes that follow characters as they walk through adjacent settings.
Along with the Bela Tarr-inspired long tracking shots, Van Sant also makes Elephant non-chronological as the same events are sometimes seen multiple times from different characters perspectives a narrative technique Tarr used in his masterpiece, Satantango .
A film like “Kids” serves as a shocking wake-up call to absentee parents, while “Elephant” and “Paranoid Park” exist to show how this lack of supervision has gone too far, leading to death (from the last year alone, add pics such as “What Richard Did” and “ Les Apaches ” to that list, all triggered by acts of teenage murder).
Palo Alto falls in the same moody and contemplative cinematic matrix that includes movies like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, Larry Clark’s Bully, and Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides.
Director Van Sant, for all his excesses in movies like Paranoid Park and Elephant, usually makes his adolescents and their anxieties seem real.
On the first day of high school, buddies Ryan (Troy Gentile, “Nacho Libre”) and Wade (newcomer Nate Hartley) and new sidekick Emmit (David Dorfman, “The Ring”) become targeted by senior bully Filkins (Alex Frost, “Elephant”) who makes their life such a battlefield they think their only hope for peace is their own professional bodyguard.
That first day of school also includes an epic embarrassment at the hands of two bullies: Filkins (Alex Frost of Elephant) and his lapdog Ronnie (Josh Peck of The Wackness).
Superbad (2007) offered us three über-dork high-school seniors desperate to fit in and get laid, and here we have essentially the same three kids as freshmen desperate only not to be killed by the school bully (Alex Frost, Elephant).
If inadvertently wearing matching shirts isn't enough to draw a target on the boys' foreheads, Wade's meek attempt at rescuing the pint-sized Emmit ("The Ring's" David Dorfman) from hallway locker entombment draws the attention of the crazed Filkins (Alex Frost, who made his debut as one of the picked-on kids who turn to violence in Gus Van Sant's Columbine- inspired drama, “Elephant” ).
Nobody attending the film's McKinley High 2 ever texts each other or boasts of how many MySpace friends they have or goes to a class with computers on the desks, and the cheeky casting of Elephant 's Alex Frost notwithstanding, this is a movie about bullying that evidently takes place in some alternate universe where Columbine didn't happen, since none of the adult characters treat the threat of school violence seriously.
Owen Wilson plays a homeless Army vet who accepts a job as a bodyguard for three exceedingly nerdy high school freshmen (the well-cast Nate Hartley, Troy Gentile and David Dorfman) against the most sadistic, psychopathic bully ever filmed (Alex Frost, who played the killer in Gus Van Sant's Elephant ).
In portraying the cycle of addiction -- using drugs, trying to get clean, then giving in again -- Trainspotting recalls Drugstore Cowboy and The Basketball Diaries.
Trainspotting is that rare movie ( Drugstore Cowboy is another) that owns up to the euphoria of drugs as well as their risks.
As "Drugstore Cowboy" did, "Trainspotting" has the audacity to suggest the pleasures of junk.
Think "Drugstore Cowboy" with a deep burr and a joy de vivre that makes adolescent nihilism positively enticing.
Distante de otras congéneres más dramáticas sobre drogadicción como el surrealismo ante una realidad difícil de distinguir en El almuerzo desnudo (Naked Lunch, 1991) pero un tanto similar a la meditabunda Drugstore Cowboy (1989), el humor negro y escatológico en Trainspotting convergen en un ambiente crudo, “fiestero” y permisivo en el uso de las drogas, recorriendo sus vaivenes para después guiar al lado negativo, a la desgracia en su entorno y a la aspereza en sus consecuencias.
What makes Presence so formally interesting is that Soderbergh shows this family from the perspective of the eponymous presence. He shows us this family in small, unedited scenes, and his camera is almost always at a distance from everyone—in an approach that reminds of Paranormal Activity by way of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, in a way.
Gus Van Sant's fictionalized Elephant from 2003, inspired by the Columbine High School massacre four years earlier, remains arguably the most provocative American film made about a national tragedy of this type.
Greengrass doesn’t belabor the point or linger on the violence; nor does he abstract it, as Gus Van Sant did in “Elephant.”
Marla has deafening echoes of not just Gone Girl ’s Amy Dunne (a blunt, sliced blonde bob; the icy, clipped voiceover) but also Nicole Kidman’s Suzanne Stone in To Die For .
More “Local Hero” with sass than “Erin Brockovich” with gas, “Promised Land” is directed by Gus Van Sant with a slow, loose pace and confident charm.
Though a little heavy handed at times (Dustin, out to save the town, is given the last name “Noble”), Damon and Krasinski have crafted a very well thought out tale, one that comes across as “Local Hero” meets “Erin Brockovich.”
Otherwise, the politics are blunt and the story is familiar, especially if you’ve seen Bill Forsyth’s 1983 Scottish film, Local Hero, wherein a couple of sharp city-slickers come to a small town waving bags of cash around in exchange for resource rights, until they meet a pocket of resistance.
Hill’s debut has drawn a lot of comparison to the no-filter styling of director Larry Clark, and it also easily calls to mind Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park.
He tips his hat here to Van Sant’s dreamy 2007 skateboarding drama “Paranoid Park,” borrowing the boxy aspect ratio and attempting similarly lyrical interludes while studiously avoiding that film’s sinister undercurrents.
The House of the Devil (2009)
Directed by Ti West
influenced by Gerry (2002), Last Days (2005)
Visuals
It's a variation on what Gus Van Sant has been doing for the last several years with films like Gerry and Last Days, stripping character and narrative down to the most basic requirements and focusing instead on observation in real time.
It's a variation on what Gus Van Sant has been doing for the last several years with films like Gerry and Last Days, stripping character and narrative down to the most basic requirements and focusing instead on observation in real time.
The opening scene, with golden leaves skittering along the chartered streets and front yards of a nowhere Portland suburb, recalls the beginning of John Carpenters Halloween.