More Van Sant

What other Gus Van Sant movies have you seen, and how do you think they compare with "Idaho"?

(I've seen Drugstore Cowboy, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, To Die For, Good Will Hunting, Psycho, Elephant. My favorite of these is "Drugstore Cowboy" with the fantastic Matt Dillon and William S. Burroughs. I also really liked "To Die For" with Matt Dillon and Nicole Kidman — and River's brother, Joaquin Phoenix. These films were far more mainstream, at least in presentation, than "Idaho," but still offbeat and dark and humorous and sad.)

The bard of Portland

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?