Tag: gvansant

Things I want to write about, given world enough (or time)

  • Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycling through the red states. C1‘s playing in Boise, where it was shot (and Barney’s hometown), and C3 has apparently won the Strangest Movie Shown In Nashville Award. (Heads up, bootleggers: The Tennessean’s Kevin Nance has a screener tape!)
  • Gerry reviewed in the Guardian (“If you can imagine Dude, Where’s my Car? by Samuel Beckett”). Casey Affleck writes about working–as an actor, editor, and writer–with Gus Van Sant. Net net, this means the DVD is still years away, I guess…
  • Film, Samuel Beckett’s only screenplay (besides the aforementioned DWMC?), in which a man (Buster Keaton) is pursued by an only occasionally perceived camera. Film at The Modern World. Up to 30 of you can buy it on VCD from the Czech Republic. via Dublog
  • One 9/11 pseudo-docu too many, reviewed and excoriated in the Voice. (Still, it’s a good argument for getting HBO; this horrible-sounding Bushagiography is on Showtime.) Related: Gail Sheehy’s impressive Observer article about the WTC widows who are holding the administration’s obfuscatory feet to the fire over details of the 9/11 AM timeline.
  • The Hirshhorn Museum, reviewed by Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes fame.

    • Shoot sequentially, post asynchronously

    Gerry, still, Gus van Sant

    Don’t know how I missed this; in Feb., Gus Van Sant talked to The Onion A.V. Club about making his films. The sequential filming mode from Gerry was used again on Elephant; with a small, light crew, Van Sant was practically flying along, shooting whatever he wanted. It was an approach he’d missed since his first feature, Mala Noche.
    One review of Gerry deadpanned that Los Angeles is enough of a desert itself, why go to Death Valley; since reading it, I’ve wanted to do a shot-for-shot remake of Gerry, set in teeming east LA. After all, for a west-side anglo, being stuck on foot in East LA could be as alienating and threatening as an empty desert.
    [Update: I finally found it; It was a Voice interview with Van Sant, who said: “In the West, as soon as you get out of town, depending on which direction you go, you can hit desert, especially in L.A. I mean, L.A. is really a desert anyway.”
    Unfortunately, there’s something screwy going on with the DVD release of Gerry. Criterion is apparently handling it, but there’s no mention of it at all on their site.