gus van sant Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Gus Van Sant has been known to pick up a book or two to adapt in his time. Most recently, it was the less-than-stellar Paranoid Park. But now he's getting ready for something a little different. Rather than grabbing a finished work from a popular scribe, he's teaming with the writer to kick off the process. Variety reports that Van Sant is joining forces with Bret Easton Ellis to write a film about the double suicides of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake -- a step up from last year's news that the scribe would be writing as Van Sant consulted.

You probably heard about their deaths back in 2007. The filmmaker/game designer Duncan died after mixing Tylenol PM and alcohol, while her long-term artist boyfriend Blake was last seen walking into the Atlantic Ocean a week later to join her in death. But it wasn't just some sort of star-crossed death pact. As Vanity Fair outlined in "The Golden Suicides," the pair were said to have become conspiracy theorists, sure that they were being harassed by Scientologists; their Venice neighbor even claimed to have been invited to an old man orgy of sorts. The script will be written from that article, so it should have a good mix of artistic promise and sad paranoia.

What comes next will most likely be the casting, although hopefully not another year later. Who do you think should play the pair? I'm thinking Blake should definitely be grabbed by Mark Ruffalo, and Duncan ... I'm going to go out on a limb and say Olivia D'Abo.

At 21, High School Musical star Zac Efron's old enough to drink ... and, well, old enough to roll around in the mud for some grungy cheesecake photos for Interview magazine. The pics accompany a story by director Gus Van Sant for the magazine's March 24 issue, in which Van Sant appreciates Efron's "well-scrubbed young mannishness."

Efron's obviously working hard to transcend the teen-dream persona that's made him a star, and it looks like it's a shaky transition. The next HSM film will feature a whole new stable of Disney-fresh teen faces, and while Efron's too old for the tween set, he's still stuck acting younger than his age -- his next films will be 17 Again, an abominable sounding comedy in which he plays a magically rejuvenated Matthew Perry, and Me and Orson Welles, a period comedy from Richard Linklater about a teenager who's cast in a Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar, circa 1937 (read our review here).

An excerpt from the Interview piece is available online, and it's notable for two things -- Mikael Janssen's hunky photos, reminiscent of Bruce Weber's 1980's Calvin Klein pin-up boys, and that Van Sant is, unsurprisingly, far more interesting than Efron.

VAN SANT: And so the play that they're putting on in the film is Julius Caesar?

EFRON: Yeah. Orson Welles was doing Julius Caesar, but he had a unique adaptation. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but Stalin was Julius Caesar in the Orson Welles adaptation, so it put a whole new practical spin on the play at the time, which was really neat.

(...)

VAN SANT: How old is Orson Welles in your movie?

EFRON: He's in his mid-twenties, but he's got the wisdom and the presence of a 50-year-old . . . Well, you know, a 30-year-old guy. [laughs]

Vanity Fair is known for their ambitious (and sometimes controversial) photo spreads, and whenever one pops up online -- with the exception of those ultra funky Hitchcock recreations -- the name most likely associated with them is Annie Leibovitz. She's worked as the featured portrait photographer for VF since 1983, and some of her most buzzed-about photos include the very pregnant (and very naked) Demi Moore Vanity Fair cover, as well as the sexed-up Miley Cyrus photo that caused quite the stir last year. Some of the more geeky Leibovitz images can be found in her series of Disney photographs featuring celebs recreating classic scenes from our favorite Walt Disney movies (read more about that here and here).

This time around, Leibovitz's Something Just Clicked collection for Vanity Fair features 10 partnerships that helped generate more than four dozen Oscar nods this year. The image above, featuring Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger (The Risktakers), is of course a composite, but it's one of my favorites -- especially the way they position both Nolan and Ledger, with the former quietly sneaking off to the corner away from the spotlight. Other partnerships photographed include Woody Allen and Penelope Cruz (The Odd Couple), Nicole Kidman and Baz Luhrmann (The Colonists), Gus Van Sant and Sean Penn (The Milk Men), Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet (The Partnership) and Darren Aronofsky and Mickey Rourke (The Ringers), among others. Check out a few of our favorites below, then swing over to Vanity Fair to see the rest.

Casting choices can sometimes be shocking, and if the same character makes it to the big screen more than once, chances are the casting choices will be quite diverse. I mean, we've already had Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, and Christian Bale as Batman in recent years. But how about Jack Black in place of Heath Ledger?

MTV had a brief chat with Gus Van Sant, who is getting ready to bring Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to the big screen. The director admitted that his ideal choice for Ken Kesey is the late Ledger, but since that can't happen, Van Sant said: "There's the opportunity that it could be Jack Black." But first, he's waiting to get the first draft from screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who penned the wonderful Milk for Van Sant).

As much as I've gotten used to casting twists, this is about the last replacement I'd ever think of. Jack Black? Really? That just seems silly. And as much as Dustin eases my Van Sant worries (I'm not a fan of his previous Cowgirls and Paranoid adaptations), because Milk was so great, the thought of Black as Kesey does nothing for my hope. If this is the direction Van Sant is leading towards, maybe we should help him out.

Who would you cast for these folks? Ken Kesey. Hunter S. Thompson. William S. Burroughs. Allen Ginsberg. Timothy Leary. Plus, musically-inclined folks like Jerry Garcia, The Beatles, and Jefferson Airplane?

"DE is a way of doing. It is a way of doing everything you do. DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage which is also the quickest and most efficient way, as you will find as you advance in DE." -- William Burroughs

You might already be a fan of the fabulous William Burroughs essay/short story Do Easy, but did you know that Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Milk) adapted the essay for the screen in the form of a short film called The Discipline of DE (which also happened to be the director's first project wayyy back in 1982). The short, while on YouTube, is also part of the new Wholphin DVD, which is a quarterly DVD magazine from McSweeney's that showcases -- what they like to call -- "unique and ponderable films designed to make you feel the way we felt when we learned that dolphins and whales sometimes, you know, do it." Not only is this a really quirky and fun film to watch (read the essay too!), but it's message is a timely one -- what with the new year and all. So check it out below and enjoy.

After a couple of weeks off (I had a bad case of Twilight fever), Indie Winners returns with a look at the best-performing independent films at the box office this weekend. As Indie Spotlighter Eric D. Snider noted before the long holiday weekend began, precious few new releases have entered the marketplace recently, so let's focus on two that distinguished themselves financially.

1. Milk (Focus Features)
2. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight)

Avoiding the fall festival circuit, and even drawing some criticism for not opening in time to possibly influence California's vote on Proposition 8, Gus Van Sant's Milk finally debuted to very strong numbers, earning $38,361 per screen (36) in 19 cities, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. Milk opened last Wednesday and has been riding a wave of critical acclaim (93% positive, per Rotten Tomatoes, including our own James Rocchi). It will expand its theater count over the next couple of weeks.

In contrast, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire followed the fall festival circuit, generated glowing early word, and continues to perform well in (slightly) expanded release in its third week, scoring a per-screen average of $27,898 at 49 locations. Slumdog Millionaire also has received extremely positive reviews (92% at Rotten Tomatoes) and is likewise inspiring good word of mouth.

The old, if not profound, lesson? Specialty audiences have been responding to intelligent films that resonate emotionally, ones that sound different from the usual art house fare. Stars like Sean Penn and Josh Brolin may snare some viewers, but I'd bet it's the rousing treatment of important (and pertinent) subjects that drives Milk to a solid success as it expands. Lacking recognizable stars, Slumdog Millionaire definitely is building momentum because of its underdog tale and looks primed to be a crossover success.

Milk is a well-intentioned film, but it's also well-made, and it never confuses nobility of purpose with narrative direction. It's full of inspiration and aspiration, but at the same time, it never kids itself -- or us -- about the tricky, twisty ways of modern American urban politics. It's a sincere plea for equality that doesn't ignore the challenges of prejudice and fear. It celebrates past victories and speaks to current struggles; it mourns devastating losses and is still a hymn to hope. It commemorates a man and spotlights a movement; it avoids cliché feel-good moments but still wrings richness out of moments that feel good. It has a heart, and a brain; it's tender and loving while also being sexy and hot; it features a brilliant performance from Sean Penn but surrounds him with other talented actors doing superb work. Milk is adult and intelligent in ways many films are not, and it's rousing and enthralling in a way few films are. It's a minor miracle of sheer film making joy and determination, and one of the best American films of 2008.

Directed by Gus Van Sant (Elephant, My Own Private Idaho), Milk is radically conventional; it's also subtly, gracefully, innovative and sharp. Best of all, Milk shows us a man who may have been a martyr, but who was most assuredly not a saint -- and makes us respect his accomplishments all the more by showing us the public work and private deals it took to make them happen. Sean Penn stars as Harvey Milk, a New York white collar worker who, at 40, came out of the closet, moved to San Francisco in 1972 with his lover Scott Smith (James Franco) and opened a business and got active -- first as a community organizer, then as a political candidate and ultimately a San Francisco City Supervisor in 1977, the first openly gay elected official in California. Milk was killed in 1978, when his fellow Supervisor, Dan White (Josh Brolin) shot and killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Milk in the wake of White's resignation. It's hard to imagine an audience member not knowing this going into Milk, and yet Van Sant wisely puts it up front, to contextualize Milk's work and to let the film -- and the audience -- commemorate a life instead of merely chronicling a death.

In a fitting move to, ahem, milk the boycott against Cinemark Theaters and its subsidiaries for having openly supported Proposition 8's ban on gay marriage, moviegoers are now being encouraged to see Gus van Sant's new film, Milk -- a biopic about Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn), who valiantly fought for gay rights before his tragic death in 1978 -- at any theater but those owned by Cinemark.

The website No MILK for Cinemark! also feature a printable PDF for flyers that say as much, as well as a link to its corresponding Facebook group, which had over 17,000 members as of this writing. Their revised aim is to cost the business $10,000, or equivalent to the amount donated by CEO Alan Stock to the Yes on 8 campaign.

It's a film well worth watching, though I can't say much (and don't really need to -- our James Rocchi will say his piece soon enough), but chances are that those going to see this film will be equally willing to give this movement some consideration.

For Halloween week, I thought I'd go back and challenge one of the biggest movie myths of recent years: that Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998) is the worst remake of all time. On the contrary... it's actually one of the most fascinating of all remakes, and a great deal more satisfying than almost any other horror remake. Let me explain. If we go back and look at the history of horror movies, we can divide up the last 100 years into sections. There were the Expressionist horrors of the silent era, then the Universal monsters, then Val Lewton's RKO films, the British Hammer films, the Italian horrors, the American Renaissance of the 1970s, the 1980s tongue-in-cheek films, the Asian horrors of the 1990s, and now -- remakes.

There were three factors that made Psycho different from other horror remakes. It was based on a high-quality, undisputed classic rather than some slapdash, B-level monster movie. It was shot-for-shot, and a respected art house director made it. Van Sant had earned some fame, acclaim and an Oscar nomination (for Good Will Hunting), and so by signing on to do the remake he unconsciously indicated that he was stepping into Hitchcock's shoes, which was unforgivable, and also impossible. If a fourth-rate hack had tried it, it would have been laughed at, or ignored, out of existence. But Van Sant's skill and reputation made it stick.

I usually don't heavily rant here on Cinematical, but one of the stories that fired me up was the news that Footloose was getting remade into a cinematic musical with Zac Efron. No, this isn't a remake of the live musical a la Producers, but rather a straight remake from the film. Now, Variety reports that the project is being fast-tracked and could start production this spring. First, however, Peter Sollet (the director of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist) is penning a rewrite of Jon Hartmere's script. Then we can watch our beloved '80s classic get Efronized. In the meantime, the songs are being cooked up -- ones that will combine new tunes with some of the old favorites. Yeah, I'm still not sold.

In more drug-centric news: It looks like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which Gus Van Sant grabbed in June of last year, is still moving forward. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Fox Searchlight has picked up the project. However, they're not sharing any news about when the film will get made or released. Maybe never? Yes, I'm bitter about this project too, but that's just because I was not happy with how he handled Tom Robbins and Blake Nelson's work, so I really don't want Tom Wolfe added to the mix. What do you think? Can Van Sant handle the lives of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters?