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Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 2:14PM Jose here to announce this year's Cannes Film Festival lineup.
As usual, Cannes will fill the Croisette with names we've heard year after year, but when those names are Pedro Almodóvar, the Dardenne brothers and Lars von Trier, you won't listen to much complains from our side.
This year the official lineup will include the following films:
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 6:51PM Alexa here. Lately James Franco has gotten a lot of press for his artistic aspirations, earning multiple degrees while he exhibits his artwork in Berlin, seemingly hosting the Oscars as an afterthought. So also getting attention is "Unfinished", an exhibition of film and visual art by Franco and Gus Van Sant. Most of the attention is focused on Franco, and what the show reveals about him. (For the exhibit he reedited footage from My Own Private Idaho, creating a 12-hour-long film titled My Own Private River.)
But what I find interesting about the show, currently showing at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, is seeing what Gus Van Sant is like as a painter. He studied film and painting at RISD, and was there at the same time as David Byrne (apparently urging Byrne to keep singing). These watercolor portraits of young men, shown alongside Franco's film, obviously recall Mike and Scott from My Own Private Idaho, and share the film's dreamlike, loose, almost gangly quality.
more paintings after the jump...
California, Curio, Gus Van Sant, James Franco Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 3:45PM In his ongoing hipster efforts to become the gayest straight man of all time, or maybe just the most storied and/or most interesting celebrity of the new millenium, James Franco recently joined forces with his Milk (2008) auteur Gus Van Sant for another look at the gay hustler drama My Own Private Idaho (1991) starring Keanu Reeves and the late great River Phoenix. They've collaborated on a two film exhibit for the Gagosian called "Unfinished". It opens this saturday so that Franco may completely own the weekend. He's hosting the Oscars on Sunday.
The films are called Endless Idaho, which is 12 hours long featuring unused footage from the film shoot as well as footage shot years before that Van Sant showed Franco during the Milk period, and My Own Private River, which is described like so.
My Own Private River consists largely of shots of Phoenix 's character, Mike, woven into a compelling portrait. Franco describes being mesmerized by Phoenix 's "uninhibited acting" in this unreleased footage, and his edit captures the gifted actor at his most emotionally expressive and physically dynamic. The score is by Michael Stipe, who is an art school drop-out.
If I were in Beverly Hills, I'd gladly take this in. River Phoenix's "Mike" is one of the best performances of the Nineties if you ask me, and he was criminally denied an Oscar nomination (the film was completely snubbed though River did win the Independent Spirit Award). I still vividly remember receiving the news of his death, a shock so sudden and dispiriting for the cinema that I have (gratefully) only ever experienced it's like one other time (Heath Ledger).
