Article: Call-In Commentary: Watch the “Promised Land” trailer with director Gus Van Sant
The acclaimed filmmaker behind “Milk” and “Elephant” takes you inside his ripped-from-the-headlines environmental drama.
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Gus Van Sant
Article: Gus Van Sant’s “Promised Land” gets its first theatrical trailer
The movie stars and was co-written by Matt Damon and John Krasinski.
Article: Taylor Lautner teams up with Gus Van Sant in untitled nonfiction film
This one isn’t too much of a surprise. A couple months back, Taylor Lautner was spotted grabbing lunch around town with almost-”Breaking Dawn” director Gus Van Sant and his “Milk” collaborator, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. While at the time, Lautner brushed off the dates as friends hanging out, speculation assumed that the three of them…
Article: What to Watch on IFC: September 19 – 25
Here’s what to watch this week on IFC: Monday In our hit comedy series “Portlandia” life in Portland, Oregon seems to involve asking, “Is it local?,” playing hide and seek and wearing a lot of fleece. Get a different version of life in the Rose City when Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy” airs at 8…
Article: What to Watch on IFC: May 16 – 22
Summer is taking its own sweet time in kicking into gear, so slather on some bronzer, fix yourself a pina colada and settle down by the warming glow of the television. Here’s what to watch this week on IFC: Monday Paul Verhoeven’s “Basic Instinct” stars Sharon Stone as a mystery writer/suspected serial killer/bisexual with a…
Article: Can’t Be At Cannes 2011, Friday Edition
It sucks not being at the Cannes Film Festival. To keep you up-to-speed on all the latest developments with the minimum amount of pain and jealousy, we’ll be providing frequent roundups of all the biggest news and best reviews. This is the second; for additional installments, along with all our Cannes coverage, can be found…
Article: Spend Saturday With Gus Van Sant
Spend Saturday with our Gus Van Sant Double Feature Extravaganza! Beginning at 2:15 p.m. ET you can see some of the finest work the director has put out to date. In “Paranoid Park”, which airs at 2:15 p.m. ET, Van Sant gives a dark portrait of adolescent longing and anxiousness. Alex, played by Gabe Nevins,…
Article: ‘Wassup Rockers’ Larry Clark Wants To Know
Ten years after “Kids,” Larry Clark returns to the world of teenagers in the film “Wassup Rockers”. Like “Kids,” the film exposes the adolescent world of every parent’s nightmare: sex, drugs, violence, and skateboarding. Like Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park,” this film takes place in the underground scene of skaters, but instead of Portland in…
Article: Get To Know “My Own Private Idaho”
River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves were a match made in filmmaker’s heaven. Especially if that filmmaker is Gus Van Sant and he is making a film about hustlers on the mean streets of Portlandia …er, Portland. “My Own Private Idaho” airs on IFC tonight at 10:05 p.m. ET. While the film is a riff on…
Article: ‘To Die For’: Murder Is A Small Price For Fame
Gus Van Sant’s 1995 mockumentary “To Die For” examines America’s obsession with fame in a darkly comic fashion. The film is adapted from the true life and crimes of Pamela Smart, a school coordinator who was imprisoned for seducing a 16 year old student and convincing him to kill her husband. It stars Nicole Kidman…
Article: What to Watch on IFC: February 21 – 27
While February is technically the shortest month of the year, sometimes it feels like it drags on and on forever. You’ve already survived December and January and are ready for Spring, but February has the unforgivable characteristic of dropping snow on you despite the fact that Punxsutawney Phil swore on his little rodent bible that…
Article: Terrence Malick’s “Good Will Hunting”
Tom Shone has a few “Good Will Hunting”-centric excerpts from a recent interview he did with Matt Damon on his blog. One particularly tasty anecdote involves Damon and cowriter Ben Affleck getting notes from Terrence Malick, who, Shone notes, “happened to be best friends with Affleck’s godfather”: “We just asked if we could have a…
Article: Coming of Age in ‘Paranoid Park’
With unflinching cinematography, Paranoid Park gives a dark portrait of adolescent longing and anxiousness. Alex, played by newcomer Gabe Nevins, is an unfulfilled and apathetic teenager who befriends a young anarchist at the local skater hangout a.k.a. Paranoid Park. The teens aren’t satisfied with the uneasy existence of adolescence and long to experience something gritty…
Article: Gus Van Sant’s ‘Last Days’: A Beautiful Tragedy
Gus Van Sant’s film ‘Last Days’ takes an anonymous look at the final days of a very famous rock star. Blake, played by Michael Pitt, is an eerie stand-in for Nirvana’s lead singer Kurt Cobain. He looks like him, he dresses like him, and he acts like him. Blake is the leader of an unexpectedly…
Article: Eight movie characters who show off their video game skills.
Recently, Roger Ebert re-entered the “can video games be art?” fray with a resounding “no!”: “Why aren’t gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.” He’s kicked off the usual counter-responses and angry passions. A less loaded question might be: can the act of playing…
Article: Why does it matter who makes “Twilight”?
According to Lainey Gossip, “Twilight: Eclipse” is up for some reshoots. There are “creative differences” between director David Slade (“Hard Candy,” “30 Days of Night”) over some scenes that need to be reshot if the June deadline is to be met. Let me reiterate: there are “creative differences.” About “Twilight.” If there’s any franchise that…
Article: Bigger, shinier and in more dimensions.
The movies are an appropriate obsession for a nation as in love with technology as we are here in the US. In their short lifetime, film has raced from silent, hand-cranked black and white shorts to sound, color, widescreen, CGI, home viewing, digital and so on: the relentless march of progress is something most people…
Article: The Naughts: The Actor of the ’00s
Quietly and unexpectedly, Matt Damon has become the premier Hollywood actor of the past decade. He’s lent his minutely constructed, surprisingly athletic performances to the films of directors Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant, Paul Greengrass, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, a roster that’s not coincidentally produced some of the most vital and successful films of…
Article: The Family That Slays Together: Ten Domestic Slashers
If you feel like you’ve seen this week’s new slasher flick “The Stepfather” before, you probably have, even if you’re not a fan of the 1987 original starring “Lost”‘s Terry O’Quinn. That’s because the family-bands-together-to-fend-off-the-one-member-who-turns-on-the-rest trope is at the heart of dozens of horror movies. Need proof? Here’s a list of ten different types of…
Article: No One Knows Anything
Last week, America’s indie film community took a long, hard look at its precarious state. After industry pros flew back home from the Toronto International Film Festival — heads throbbing from too many drinks, not enough sleep and the lackluster marketplace, where few films were bought and sold — many headed straight to the IFP’s…
Article: Drifting Out of Focus
Joel and Ethan Coen have an almost chronic aversion to being taken seriously. Their darkest movies are nevertheless laced with black humor, and in interviews, they tend to rebuff the idea that their work is about anything other than what appears on the surface. Even to the actors who have worked with them, their intentions…
Article: Interview: Gus Van Sant on “Milk”
By Aaron Hillis 2008 is officially a banner year for American auteur Gus Van Sant (“Elephant,” “My Own Private Idaho”). His hauntingly gorgeous and affecting arthouse drama “Paranoid Park” wowed the critical establishment last spring, but this week sees a more mainstream release that will easily earn him another Oscar nomination for best director. Based…
Article: Interview: Rob Epstein on “The Times of Harvey Milk”
By Alison Willmore When “The Times of Harvey Milk,” director Rob Epstein’s electric, Oscar-winning documentary about the life and tragic death of politician and gay rights activist Harvey Milk, premiered in 1984, Dan White, the man who assassinated the film’s subject, had already been released from prison. Milk, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Castro Street,” became…
Article: Trailering: Sean Penn as St. Harvey Milk.
When the International Museum of GLBT History opened in San Francisco in 2003, its inaugural exhibit was entitled “Saint Harvey: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Gay Martyr,” and included, as its central relic, the bloodstained suit in which Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978. There’s an identical air of a commemoration of martyrdom…
Article: “Oh, my God, I’m kissing Spicoli.”
Yet again, the world in quotes: “The ï¬rst kiss of the movie was out on Haight Street, with, like, 200 people watching, outside. It was a crane shot–I’m sure in the end it will be a really cool shot, but it starts close and then it takes maybe a minute. That’s a long time on…
