575 - "You gotta give 'em hope..."

I came across this video on Blake Whitman's blog (he works for Vimeo, the BEST video site on the net). It is a quiet and meditative look at the recreation of Harvey Milk's camera shop at 575 Castro St. in San Francisco, for Gus Van Sant's biopic Milk (which was reviewed here). This film is amazing, and amazingly simple. Primarily made up of static shots, with light being the only motion, and with the audio of Milk's final, taped message before his assassination by Dan White, 575 Castro St. is, at once, intimate and heartbreakingly beautiful. 

575 Castro St. from FilmInFocus on Vimeo.

Milk

Gus Van Sant has been one of the most consistently good filmmakers of the last twenty plus years. From his breakout film Drugstore Cowboy, to his Oscar winner Good Will Hunting, to his critically acclaimed trilogy about death (Gerry, Elephant,  and Last Days), Van Sant has made a lot of great films on a small, independent scale. Milk is probably the closest he's ever really gotten to making a mainstream movie, and may be the closest he will ever get.

Milk is the story of Harvey Milk, San Francisco's first openly gay city official. It picks up Harvey's story on the night of his fortieth birthday in New York City, when he meets Scott Smith(played by James Franco), the man who will, effectively, become the great love of Harvey's life. Harvey and Scott eventually migrate to San Francisco to be a part of a more gay-friendly environment, and settle in the Castro district. As time goes on, Harvey see's so many things about his environment that he wants to change, but, in order to do so, he must gain the power to do so. In order to do this, he runs for a city supervisor position and loses. Every few years he runs again and again, and loses again and again. By this time, he has become famous in his community, but when he decides to run one more time, he loses Scott, who walks out on him, sick of having to deal with Harvey giving all of himself to politics. It is then that Harvey wins the position. When he takes his seat, he meets, and tries to allign with another newly elected supervisor - Dan White(played by Josh Brolin). Harvey tries to support Dan, but eventually begins to become more and more famous, and more and more adamant about changing the city's laws and treatment towards the homosexual population. This causes friction between Dan and Harvey, and eventually, after losing his job, Dan comes back to City Hall for Harvey, with a gun.

Milk is an interesting film from a historical perspective. It made me realize that the homosexual population, especially in America, have there own history, their own hero's and villian's. All of the actor's did an exceptional job, though sometimes it feels like Sean Penn's Harvey Milk seemed to be schizophrenically flamboyant. One moment he would be the serious politician looking to change things, and the next he came off as almost a Hollywood stereotype (though I do stand by the fact that stereotypes are born out of truth, and therefore there may have been truth to Penn's flamboyance). Ultimately, though, the film suffered the fate of many recent biopics - it was just kind of boring. I mean, Van Sant did all the right things - used period news reel footage, included the most interesting and relevant parts, and gave us characters we could cheer for but, still, something was just missing. I think that, ultimately, the biopic (in general) suffers from the fact that, ultimately, you know what the outcome is. It's so hard to find a story to tell that someone either doesn't know the outcome of, or couldn't hit up wikipedia or google to find every last ounce of relevant information to. Milk is a good film, and certainly a good addition to Van Sant's resume, but I found myself, at the end, saying "Alright", getting out of my seat, walking out of the theater and not caring about anything I saw for the last two hours just like I have with almost every biopic I've seen in the last couple of years.

DVD - Paranoid Park

Gus Van Sant, at this point, could probably be considered a master. His career has spanned over twenty years, his films have garnered both critical and commercial acclaim, and he has even been up for an Oscar (a feat that many independent director's never achieve). And why should any of his latest films fail to live up to the mark he has already established?

Paranoid Park is an intensely hypnotic chronicle of one boy's travails through the Portland skateboarding scene. When Alex gets ditched by his friend Jared one night, he decides to head over to Paranoid Park, the skate park on the edge of town where all of the hard core skaters hang out. There, he meets a few scrappy older kids. One of them invites him to go ride the freight trains with him, and they head off to a nearby train yard. While riding the trains, a security guard tries to beat them with a bat to get them down, but Alex gives him a good smack across the face with his skateboard causing the guard to fall over onto another set of tracks, where his body is cut cleanly in half by an oncoming train. The other boy runs off, leaving Alex to deal with the aftermath. 

Paranoid Park sticks with Van Sant's recent, almost documentary style that he's used his last couple of films to perfect. Like Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, Van Sant follows the story of Alex in an incredibly matter of fact way, giving the audience very little ups or downs, but instead letting the entire story rest on the shoulders of the interaction between characters. In other words - If you don't like character driven stories, you WILL NOT like this film. There's no high tension between Alex and the detective who suspects that he knows more than he's saying, no judgement placed on Alex for what he has done, it is simply a story about a young boy who makes a series of choices and where those choices take him.

The film, as I said before, is incredibly hypnotic. Van Sant intersperses a lot of Super 8 into the skateboarding scenes, and gives pieces of the film an almost pastoral feel. Christopher Doyle, the legendary Hong Kong cinematographer who has lensed all of Wong Kar Wai's best films, lends some of his trademark visuals to the film, and gives me the sense that the two of these guys together could make an unstoppable team when it comes to visuals. Van Sant continues his use of, primarily, unknown actors in the film, as evidenced especially by Alex's friend Macy (played by Lauren McKinney). While McKinney is not bad, she has some of those junior high theater class moments where you think "Okay, she needs a little bit more practice...". Van Sant has seen both ups and downs with this choice, having launched a few careers, but also populating some of his films with people that just shouldn't be on camera until they have some more experience under their belt.