Did you like the Henry IV story line? Do you think it was well-executed?
Here's an excerpt from an Amy Taubin piece on "Idaho." I think it's a good big-picture description of the film:
What is striking about Idaho today in light of Van Sant’s later films is its extraordinary hybridity. Where Elephant (2003), Gerry (2002), and Psycho (2000) are structured by a single daring formal device—the extended tracking shots in Elephant and Gerry; the shot-by-shot mimicry of Hitchcock’s original in Psycho—Idaho is a collage that includes even a kitchen sink and some Little Dutch Boy cleanser to scrub it down. Van Sant mixes and matches scenes of documentary-style realism with campy musical set pieces, improvised dialogue with bowdlerized Shakespeare, dream sequences shot in grainy Super-8mm with 35mm vistas of the Pacific Northwest, and, on the soundtrack, Rudy Vallee with The Pogues. The main source materials for Idaho’s screenplay were two completely separate scripts and a short story, all written by Van Sant. One of the scripts was a modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV.
Did this work for you? Did you find a coherent whole?
