ioannismantes
Honestly one of the worst movies I have ever seen!
Really if you have something else to do you should definitely prefer it.
chetburnett9
Gus Van Sant tends to make very strange, surreal yet extremely realistic movies like Elephant, Drugstore Cowboy, To Die For, Gerry and so on. Elephant has it's own flaws, but I think it's the magnum opus of these realistic stories of surrealism, but this is definitely a contender. This is probably one of the more surreal of the films, as it ventures into magical realism, dreams, drug trips, etc. Heartthrobs, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves lead the show as Mike and Scott. Scott Favor comes from a wealthy upbringing, but decides to sleep on rooftops, streets and have sex for money. He doesn't need to, he wants to. On the other side of things is Mike, a narcoleptic, homeless bastard. These two have an unexpected friendship as they try and search for Mike's mother, steal from a man named Bob, drive through America on a moped. The film is filled with paintings of shots. It's an odyssey. Most filmmakers are unable to achieve such development of character in 4 hours, but this movie does it under two.10/10Gus Van Sant is a genius and is wasting his time with projects like The Sea of Trees, Promised Land etc.
gsygsy
It really doesn't seem 25 years ago that I first wondered at this beautiful piece of cinema. Time has been kind to it. It's even more impressive now. Its Shakespearean element seems to lift it out of a particular era, turning it into the stuff classics are made of.It is poetic, idiosyncratic work, simultaneously cool/objective and passionate/subjective, a remarkable achievement. The famous campfire scene between River Phoenix's Mike and Keanu Reeves' Scott is heartrending. The powerful confrontation between Phoenix and James Russo as Mike's brother is equally memorable. The high passions running in both section are counterpointed by the inscrutability of Reeves'face. His charisma has never been put to better use.On this second viewing, I was struck by Beatrix Aruna Pasztor's superb costume designs. They help create the film's air of timelessness.My feeling is that this movie will continue to be held, rightly, in very high esteem for a long, long time to come.
PrometheusTree64
I bought the Criterion Collection DVD of this because I loved River Phoenix before it was a cliché.Nevertheless, I saw this in the theater when it was first released, and my opinion hasn't changed: Phoenix is as good as you've heard and the film absolutely has it's moments --- many wonderful moments.Then there's Keanu.Who tried to marry this guy to Shakespeare? He's way out of his league with this kind of material. And these sections of the film, especially the group exchanges in the broken-down tenement house, seem badly edited, those conversations unclear in terms of point and plot --- and I've seen the movie multiple times.It's a shame Van Sant went down that road (the characters, specifically Keanu, breaking in and out of classical speech, which simply doesn't work), because there are many things about this picture that are really terrific... So view it with this in mind....and this: after the first couple of viewings of this hauntingly-odd picture, the flaws just seem to melt away and don't matter so much.And you can almost always tell a (potentially) good flick when it manages to inexplicably capture the zeitgeist of its era; in fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen one that evokes the cusp of the 80s/90s as vividly. (So did "Midnight Cowboy" for ITS era, so maybe male hookers is all that's really required. Go figure.) Even Keanu gives a better performance in the "normal" (non-Shakespearean) scenes than usual.And, as with every single River Phoenix movie ever filmed, this one is chock-full of eerily prescient moments of doom: like River seizing on the road, sidewalk, etc...
AD
