I think you hit the nail on the head, Deckard and I agree with nearly everything you said. The fact that his films are so different from each other is what I love about him, that he can’t be so easily pinned down. As well, he’s not an obvious auteur (again agree that the term is irrelevant) which I actually think is a compliment to him!
Jesus, look at how long my two entries are. You’d think I thought he was God the way I blathered on like that.
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Um, ignoring the pornography above, Van Sant is actually quite consistent. I don’t understand people who say otherwise. His results are often fairly mixed but you know what you are getting when you see a Van Sant film. When he’s a Hollywood hack, the results are quite bad. I doubt anyone can defend Good Will Hunting or Finding Forrester. Milk is Van Sant at his most mediocre. It’s a competent film but it doesn’t really do very much. I like Van Sant at his most minimalist, like Elephant and Paranoid Park.He has a way of capturing the banality of contemporary teenage life better than anyone (Larry Clark, please take notes).
I tip my fucking hat to Gus Van Sant. I think he’s an incredible director, and agreeing with ARI, fairly consistent. The guy can take what would otherwise be a 10 minute Scene and turn it into a beautiful piece of Film.
Unique Brave Inventive Independent
one of a handful of directors who work closely with a sound designer to create a unique effect for a film.
There’s nothing mediocre about “Milk.”
I don’t think Van Sant is interested in banality at all — in fact he’s found a way to show the life and death importance of daily life without being in any way melodramatic about it. Which is a real departure.
Milk was a powerful film for me. A group of amazing talents all at the top of their game, in my opinion. I think it was the right choice to create Milk as a more commercial film; I would have never heard of Harvey Milk if it wasn’t for the movie, and I’m sure the same goes for a lot of other people. I have since tracked down and watched the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk and have read the SUPERB biography The Major of Castro Street.
Craig Zadan and Neil Meron tried for over a decade to get a film of “The Mayor of Cstro Street” made. See my book “Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-2000” for the whole sad story.
I think once Sean Penn signed on to play Harvey it became a huge movie event, bigger even than it would have been with just Van Sant. I still think Van Sant was robbed at the Oscars, but we won’t go into that again . . .
deckard croix
Well not to put a label on Van Sant’s films but while he’s rather inconsistent in his overall output, he IS consistent within the framework of the films themselves so that one can very clearly see what approach he was using when making them. His “experimental”/quasi-documentary type films such as Last Days, Elephant, etc. are just completely different from films like To Die For or Good Will Hunting it’s almost like they’re helmed by a different director entirely, so it’s not unfounded that people (including myself) tend to group his catalog into two general groups.
The problem I think a lot of people have with Van Sant is that he’s not an “obvious auteur”. He’s not flashy with his camerawork and he doesn’t go crazy in the editing room, neither do his films have “hip storylines” – more often they deal with conflicts within a character rather than some plaguerized scenario. This is what I love about him, but he’s still very uneven in the quality of his work.
I would hesitantly call him an auteur (though I don’t really see any significant meaning in the word, but following with the meaning assigned to it on this site), but even failing that, he’s definitely one of the best directors still working today. I think we’ll be seeing even more great things from him in the coming years.