Reverse Shot. 21.

21 issues already? When you consider all the other things the Reverse Shot team gets up to, week in and week out, that's pretty amazing. 21 cheers!

Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert: "[Gus] Van Sant is an artist whose career has been more controversial than it would initially appear, whose genre-hopping has been tagged as opportunistic as often as visionary and whose aesthetic has been as malleable as putty - what better way to try and pierce the core of a wholly unique (if not wholly successful, in our eyes) oeuvre than with an in-depth symposium? So, despite the consternation, or at least bored eye-rolls, of some of our staff writers, we've forged ahead and devoted our 21st issue to Gus Van Sant."

"How did it happen that Van Sant became one of the leading lights of the moment that birthed Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater and others?" wonders Jeff Reichert. "His first film, Mala Noche, is a perhaps too-ready answer. Classic 'indie' to the core, Van Sant's debut is ultra low-budget, features grainy black-and-white cinematography, a queer storyline, and a little punk rock playing over the closing credits for good measure.... In the end, Mala Noche survives the unanswered racial and sexual questions it raises by being simply, hokey.... Even so, for all the intellectual confusion Mala Noche engenders, it might just remain Van Sant's best, most honest movie."

"Drugstore Cowboy is a moderate exercise in sentimental filmmaking that suffers for being the bearer of the next 20 years' bad news," writes Nathan Kosub in a piece that surveys the career as well: "[T]ime and again, the merits of Van Sant's films are undercut by fundamental flaws; to my mind, these errors in judgment do not dog Van Sant's reputation so much as define it."

"One of [Van Sant's] many achievements is to take the most obvious clichés of the teenage Grove Press rebellion genre - which stretched from the purity of Kerouac and Ginsberg at the top to its embarrassing corruption in Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues at the bottom - and make it seem more than glorious adolescent shock, even somehow socially conscious," writes Travis Mackenzie Hoover. "So My Own Private Idaho wasn't just gay, it was about Street Youth, and by dint of mentioning it suddenly became a serious movie rather than an extremely persuasive piece of fetishism."

"Let's acknowledge up front that, no matter how hard we strive to focus on directorial matters, the star personas of River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves must come to the forefront of any discussion of My Own Private Idaho, and we might as well let them do so rather than prevaricating uncomfortably," writes Marianna Martin. And she does, lavishing most of her attention on Phoenix.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues "may be the exact opposite of Last Days (maybe Van Sant's best film) in that Cowgirls' exploration finds a safe, pat resolution and pumps it up as profound instead of playing it deadpan," writes Ryland Walker Knight. "Perhaps best recognized as Edward Scissorhands' feminist mirror, complete with fake fingers as metaphors for fucked-up phalluses, Van Sant's film fails its characters by setting up each one as a grotesque object of ridicule."

"A satire about the now-dying medium of broadcast television, inspired by the then-timely true story of a New Hampshire woman who convinced her teenage lover and his friends to kill her husband, To Die For is an artifact of a passed cultural moment, and it plays better in memory than it does upon re-viewing," writes Chris Wisniewski. "Where once it felt fresh, funny, and challenging, it's hard now to overlook its flaws - the lopsidedness of the storytelling, the luridness and messiness of the filmmaking."

"It's not often that a director disappears quite so purposely as Gus Van Sant did into Good Will Hunting," writes Justin Stewart. "It's an almost ass-covering conceit, with a whiff of pretension - 'This isn't my art,' it says, while providing the people some capital-E entertainment. The next year would reveal the personal project that had to be put on hold while Van Sant condescended to the masses: a shot-by-shot Psycho remake, which you have to admire, if only for its sheer gumption."

Speaking of which, Michael Koresky: "Certainly the easiest line of thought was that this is a 'failed' experiment - yet wasn't it designed to fail from the start? Watching Psycho is a remarkably rigorous activity for the spectator: Van Sant actively engages your attention and film-history knowledge from first image... to last.... In this sense, by design Van Sant's experiment couldn't have truly failed for any of its critics, all understandably aghast at its existence - scanning the boundaries of every one of its frames for minute alterations in composition, construction, and performance, each viewer of Psycho found either something or nothing, but they were looking."

"I won't apologize for Finding Forrester, and given how reticent my fellow Reverse Shot writers were to address it, it doesn't seem like many of them are willing to either," writes Brendon Bouzard. "But as much as I'm reiterating how bad this movie is - and yes, it is bad - it simply cannot be ignored." His question: "[W]hat distinguishes it as a Van Sant work?"

"Some of Van Sant's early films reveal an artist finding his voice; Gerry gave its aesthetically restless director the chance to try on some eye-catching formalist clothing," writes Adam Nayman. "Its enduring value, then, is that it motivates the viewer to seek out the source of its hand-me-downs."

"Many critics labeled Elephant as irresponsible, accusing it for not being insightful enough, or for not providing sufficient rationale for the massacre," writes Ohad Landesman. "This, however, seems to be missing the point. Because if there's one thing Van Sant achieved in this film by painstakingly observing a typical high school day, is to provide context, and a fairly sufficient one. What I still fail to understand, though, is why he needed to offhandedly disperse further moralizations when he had it all in his hands in the first place. So we come back to Psycho, wondering if both films, hardly cautious about their thematic challenges, can be seriously taken as anything else besides mere exercises in form."

"What Van Sant has done with Last Days... is offer an elegiac form appropriate to a mass culture that has long exhausted the integrity it once might have claimed in reconciling audiences with the existential fact of death," writes Michael Joshua Rowin. "That's the overall point, I think, in Van Sant's 'Death Trilogy,' but one that never reaches fulfillment until Last Days."

"Gus Van Sant acknowledges the weighty presence of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr's influence on the 'Death Trilogy,'" writes Sarah Silver. "That influence is felt in Last Days in the elegiac camera movements and overwhelming importance of architecture and environment."

"No grand artistic summation or even a proper refining of pet themes and motifs, Paranoid Park finds Gus Van Sant further whittling on the same piece of wood," writes Michael Koresky. "It must be a nub by this point." That said:

Paranoid Park is most notable for the ways it effectively synthesizes the early and later parts of Van Sant's film career, melding the angsty male character studies of Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, and the River Phoenix sections of My Own Private Idaho with the heavier formal experimentation of the 'Death Trilogy.' And Van Sant's ever-tightening technical precision here shows how far he's come: whereas today, Drugstore and Idaho seem like patchwork assemblies of early indie trends (Drugstore's 'trippy' drug scenes and erratic, at times misplaced irony) and narrative spare parts (Idaho was a compendium of three separate story treatments that Van Sant smooshed together during preproduction), Paranoid Park shows a remarkable sense of focus, if not purpose.

Much of the rest of this issue, particularly the reviews of recent theatrical releases, has appeared over the past several weeks, so pointers to those pieces have appeared in the appropriate entries.

One DVD review is new, though: "It's rare to say that a film will never be topped, but that may be the case with The Opening of Misty Beethoven," writes Sean Cunningham. "Never again will a porn flick be shot on film with a decent budget and feature a director with artsy tendencies and a cinematographer who goes on to win an Oscar and two leads who can actually act. It even has a story."

Posted by dwhudson at November 14, 2007 10:47 AM