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Oscar Buzz: Who's ahead in this year's key races?

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There's a surprisingly gargantuan Internet faction dedicated to predicting who will be up for film's most coveted prize, the Academy Award. Publications like Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times and New York Times all have Oscar blogs that obsessively trail the fluctuations in buzz amongst the year's top films. That's not to mention stand-alone sites like Awards Daily and In Contention, or well-known bloggers like Jeff Wells, Dave Poland and Anne Thompson. Even Roger Ebert has devoted a wealth of recent ink on the subject. But, the truth is, no matter how much someone knows, it's still just a wild guessing game.

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Milk

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Speed Racer

Release Date: Nov. 26

Director: Gus Van Sant

Writers: Dustin Lance Black

Cinematographer: Harris Savides

Starring: Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna, James Franco

Studio Information: Focus Features, 128 mins.


Today, Harvey Milk is remembered as a local hero in San Francisco, and Sean Penn’s joyful, deeply layered portrayal in a new biopic by Gus Van Sant gives us a pretty good idea why. Harvey was the first openly gay person elected to public office in the U.S., and he served on San Francisco's board of supervisors until he and mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by a fellow supervisor, Dan White, in 1978. But the lasting image of the film isn't a gunshot or a riot but the ear-to-ear grin that tops Penn’s compact, gesticulating frame.


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On Long Island, Memories of Harvey Milk Have Expired

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The irony of Bay Shore Furriers and Leather Salon is that, while it’s the only building on the block that survived a fire six years ago, nobody seems to remember the lanky kid whose parents opened the store in the 1940s. He played linebacker for the junior-varsity team in the then-prosperous south-shore Long Island town, boxed groceries, graduated in 1947 and never really returned.

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Fox Searchlight drinks Gus Van Sant's Kool-Aid

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Director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black must have made a good team on the upcoming political biopic Milk, because the two have already made a deal with Fox Searchlight to reunite.

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James Franco, many more cast in Allen Ginsberg biopic

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photo courtesy of Getty
In the grand tradition of attractive Hollywood stars portraying iconic literary figures (think Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen, Joseph Fiennes as William Shakespeare, etc.), James Franco has been cast as groundbreaking beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg in the biopic Howl.

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Paranoid Park

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Release date: March 7
Director: Gus Van Sant
Writers: Van Sant (screenplay), Blake Nelson (novel)
Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle, Rain Kathy Li
Starring: Gabe Nevins, Taylor Momsen, Lauren McKinney
Studio/Run Time: IFC First Take, 80 mins.

Gus Van Sant’s newest film bears his fingerprints—it’s set in a Portland high school filled with disaffected teenagers (played by non-actors cast via MySpace), and it’s set against a lush classical soundtrack. And in the hands of cinematographic mastermind Christopher Doyle, teenage spats, telephone calls and coasting skateboarders are infused with lyricism and dreaminess.

Alex (strikingly natural newcomer Gabe Nevins) is a high-school student with divorcing parents, a cheerleader girlfriend he views with ambivalence, and middling skateboarding skills; he drifts through life not causing much trouble. When he starts visiting a local skate park frequented by hardcore skaters from rough backgrounds, he accidentally partakes in a grisly murder and is at a loss to deal with the emotional aftermath. His experience honestly depicts adolescent struggles to cope with grief, loss and guilt. Paranoid Park is a newer, better variation on Van Sant’s familiar themes.


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Gus Van Sant begins production on Milk

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Paste loves Gus Van Sant. Seriously*, that dude owes us a round for all the publicity we give him. But his work is just that good and we can’t get enough of it, so news that he decided to travel south for the winter for his newest film Milk to start production in San Francisco has us excited. We hope that Fred Phelps is too busy to try and protest filming.

Milk stars Sean Penn as San Francisco gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk who is known as being the first openly gay politician in California (some posit in the United States) and “The Mayor of Castro Street.” Milk was assassinated along with then mayor George Muscone by Dan White. Milk’s story doesn’t stop there, though, as White’s trial yielded only a conviction in voluntary manslaughter due to what is known as the legendary “Twinkie defense.” Punk aficionados may also recognize the trial as the topic of the Dead Kennedy’s cover of “I Fought the Law (And I Won).”

Van Sant has put together a strong cast in this biopic with Josh Brolin starring as White and additional talent including Emile Hirsch, James Franco and Diego Luna. Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen of American Beauty fame are producing with Focus Features set to release the film. Dustin Lance Black (Big Love) wrote the screenplay. That’s a lot of serious movie making talent for one film, but many Bay Area residents will likely agree that Milk’s life deserves no less than the best Hollywood has to offer.

In related news, there is no word yet on Bryan Singer’s Milk biopic which is rumored to be in development hell until the WGA strike ends.

* Not seriously at all.

Related links:
Gus Van Sant on Myspace
Milk on IMDB
Harvey Milk Biography

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com


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Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park trailer hits the web

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Gus Van Sant's upcoming feature Paranoid Park has been completed for the better part of a year since it premiered last May at Cannes, where it won the 60th Anniversary Prize.

Check out the film's trailer below:

Once again, Sant's focusing on adolescence, while this time taking a look at skateboarding sub-culture. While the feature looks to continue the trends of his last few independent features, it also seems a little less mumblecore improvised and a little more polished. Probably a good change in his career, especially with Sant moving onto a more professional production on his next feature. Paranoid Park hits theaters on March 7.

Related links:
Paste: Elephant
Paste: My Own Private Idaho
Paste: Last Days

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.


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Last Days

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Gus Van Sant's Kurt Cobain-inspired meditation on the final hours of a gifted musician

Actor Michael Pitt portrays the lost figure at the center of director Gus Van Sant’s latest excursion into unknown territory. The film is Last Days, a stark walk through a dying artist’s final moments inspired by the death of one of rock history’s great tragic heroes. Like Van Sant’s most recent films, Gerry and Elephant, an improvised script and freedom from routine cinematic language gives Last Days a hyper-real, oddly poetic flow of events, but Pitt insists it’s not a difficult film. “I know it can seem like a lot is really cryptic,” he said, “but everything is really thought out. There’s a lot of things we did that are there, but not in your face.”

With Last Days, Van Sant expands on the experiments of his last two films, opening his lens wider and letting the silence ring longer. Pitt (pictured above) is Blake, first seen stumbling alone in the wilderness, a caveman in pajamas and sunglasses. Through a random series of events we learn that he’s a rock musician living in a once-elegant mansion gone seedy with neglect, with a small entourage of housemates who incessantly seek him for advice, money and affirmation. Presumably stoned beyond repair, Blake spends Last Days dodging so-called friends, bandmates and other intrusions of the outside world, unable to secure the peace he craves.

There’s no doubt that Blake is intended to recall the late Kurt Cobain; Pitt’s emaciated frame, bedraggled blonde shag, pink sunglasses and general demeanor is sometimes uncanny in its resemblance to the long-mourned star. Van Sant cops to being influenced by the mystery of Cobain’s final hours, but the Last Days story has little in common with the facts of the case, keeping only the essential themes. “With Kurt Cobain, nobody really knew where he was the last couple of days, and what was going on,” Van Sant says. “The inspiration for Last Days was not so much the immediate event, but the ensuing questions of what happened—which was its own media event.”

Pitt submerges so deeply into the swampy depths of Blake’s character that he ends up somewhere beyond acting. His eyes are obscured behind unwashed hair and tinted plastic for most of his screen time, and when he speaks, the words dissolve into inaudible mumbles. Near the end Blake finds an acoustic guitar and is roused from his somnambulism long enough to play a wrenching ballad to himself in the film’s most affecting scene. The song, entitled “Death to Birth,” sure sounds like one of Cobain’s minor-chord folk/blues laments, but it was actually written by Pitt himself, years ago, before he’d even met Gus Van Sant.

That first encounter occurred in 1997 through a mutual friend, casting director Lori Eastside (“I actually went over there to borrow 20 bucks,” says Pitt). Van Sant had already begun drafting an early version of Last Days and thought the young actor might be right for the main character. At this point in the process, all Van Sant had was a list of things that a kid alone in a house might do over the course of a day, but the concept was pushed to the back burner. In the meantime, both kept busy, to say the least. Pitt became a dreamboat via Dawson’s Creek, worked for directors like Bernardo Bertolucci and Barbet Schroeder, and stood out as the narcissistic muse in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Van Sant captured Hollywood with Good Will Hunting, confused it with Psycho, apologized with Finding Forrester and then made two of the most uncompromising films of his career.

In 2002, Gerry dropped Matt Damon and Casey Affleck in the middle of the desert, then watched them get lost for two and a half hours. Amid gorgeous barren landscapes, this hapless duo wanders in silence broken with improvised bursts of their own private lingo, and eventually the elements overtake them. Patient viewers will find it beautiful, even meditative, and Damon and Affleck turn in uniquely subtle and natural performances. Elephant followed in 2003, Van Sant’s chilling dissection of our national mania for school shootings. A typical day in the life of a suburban high school is interrupted by a well-armed duo of piano-playing, shower-sharing outcasts. Pulling apart each layer of the story until the inevitable, brutal finale, Elephant has the voice of a teenage diarist and presents its violence with a banality that disturbs all the more.

“In these films, the dialogue isn’t leading the story,” says Van Sant. “It’s more ordinary dialogue that a person would hear walking around, and it comes from just observing ordinary life. The subject that people are discussing when you first walk into a room is so random. But we’re very used to that. That randomness is an element in real life [that] I’m trying to introduce because it makes the film life-like. So it doesn’t really matter what the actors are talking about, they’re just talking.”

Last Days benefits from Pitt’s real-world rock ’n’ roll experiences (he currently gigs with New York power trio Pagoda), but Sonic Youth founder and noise-scene booster Thurston Moore is also on board as music consultant and helped ensure the minutiae of Blake’s professional surroundings was accurate. Moore’s partner in rock and life, Kim Gordon, contributes a cameo as a record industry friend and one-woman intervention squad; unfortunately, her familiarity (not to mention a few nervous, fleeting glimpses directly into the lens) puts a dent in the fourth wall. Ricky Jay, best known for David Mamet productions and his own celebrated writings on the history of magic and unusual phenomena, appears as a private investigator on Blake’s trail, but he avoids any real detective work in favor of spinning an arcane tale of a mysterious Chinese magician that comments obliquely on the fate of his wasted quarry.

Other cast members melt into the emulsion with ease and display no strings whatsoever. Asia Argento, Lukas Haas and Scott Green are part of the clueless entourage, and they’re appropriately blank, shuffling through the decrepit mansion with the precarious arrogance of the falsely entitled. Van Sant includes random door-to-door types for verisimilitude, leading to some surreal exchanges with Jehovah’s Witnesses and a Yellow Pages ad salesman. When these people are filling the space in Van Sant’s shots, Last Days achieves the fragile reality that makes it interesting.

Michael Pitt shrugs off the suggestion that Van Sant’s last three films might confuse an audience that knows him best for his bigger multiplex hits. “It’s hard for me to speculate what people will react to and what they won’t,” he says. “I don’t know if a mainstream audience is going to get the chance [to see Last Days]. I can imagine that, given the chance it played in every theatre in Middle America, there’s a definite possibility that people will be surprised. But it’s not necessarily supposed to happen that way.” Falling short of the status quo isn’t anything Pitt worries about; after all—“My definition of ‘mainstream’ is that audience that just eats what’s in front of them, as opposed to seeking it.”

Time and pre-release gossip alone will tell whether Gus Van Sant’s next projects will follow paths similar to this trio of films. He’s one of 20 directors filming a five-minute segment for Paris, je t’aime, a projected experiment in collective filmmaking alongside peers like Jean Luc Godard, the Cohen brothers and Michel Gondry. Van Sant is also slated to direct the film adaptation of bestselling novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, and the book’s twisted, decade-defying romance should prove a worthy challenge. Regardless, Last Days serves as the cap on a trilogy of adventurous films from a brilliant cinema maverick. Pitt breaks it down his own way, when trying to explain the line that flows through all three films; “I think Gerry was the theory, Elephant was learning to manipulate the theory and Last Days is like, I don’t know, mastering the theory. But that’s just my opinion, as a Gus Van Sant fan.”


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Elephant

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Gus Van Sant’s latest film, Elephant, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last spring despite vociferous denunciations from certain American critics. With its U.S. release, it’s certain to be one of the most talked-about and controversial films of the year. The controversy might be its selling point, but the movie has more than enough credibility to justify the hype.

The story is an obvious adaptation of the Columbine shootings, despite its Portland, Oregon setting. The movie opens on the fateful morning, following various students as they wander the school’s grounds. One blond boy is late because his father was too drunk to drive him to school. Another teen takes portraits of various students and heads to the darkroom to develop his photos. A geeky girl with glasses gets taunted in gym and takes refuge in her library work. An attractive couple talks obliquely about a doctor’s “appointment” scheduled for that afternoon.

These first 50 minutes are absorbing, as Van Sant introduces his characters. He films with long Steadicam tracking shots that his hero Bela Tarr would be proud of. Van Sant also uses the Academy ratio to powerful effect, but this doesn’t feel like a video shoot. His use of fall colors is gorgeous, and he returns to the clouds of Gerry for some poignant credit sequences. He also structures the film in interesting ways, folding time back on itself on numerous occasions, creating connections between the characters and building tension as the tragedy draws closer. The lonely, understated music adds to the intensity of the story.

The final half-hour, when the film shifts its focus to the killers and then the killings, is not nearly as strong. The film’s many detractors make a point when they argue these reels feel pornographic. Nonetheless, it’s useful to see this section in relationship to Truman Capote’s landmark work In Cold Blood, in which Capote told a gruesome story of robbery and killing in America’s heartland, but largely from the killer’s point of view. The stark objectivity, refusing to assign blame or explain actions, is disconcerting but powerful. Capote’s homoeroticism finds its way into Elephant as well, with an especially provocative shower sequence. Despite these flaws, Elephant is a striking film and one that will likely force audiences to re-examine how they feel about Columbine.


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