Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 56: Wed Feb 25

My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm


This is the second film in the VITO Project, monthly screenings inspired by Vito Russo's groundbreaking film The Celluloid Closet.

Here is the Cinema Museum introduction:
ReShape and the Cinema Museum present the VITO Project, a series of free monthly screenings bringing generations of LGBTs together to provide an alternative space to mix, watch films and share ideas. We will be screening My Own Private Idaho (1991), directed by Gus Van Sant and starring River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo and William Richert. This was chosen by the audience at the showing of The Celluloid Closet (1995), and will be followed by an onstage discussion.

Chicago Reader review:
Gus Van Sant's 1990 feature, his best prior to Elephant, is a simultaneously heartbreaking and exhilarating road movie about two male hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) in the Pacific northwest. Phoenix, a narcoleptic from a broken home, is essentially looking for a family, while Reeves, whose father is mayor of Portland, is mainly fleeing his. The style is so eclectic that it may take some getting used to, but Van Sant, working from his own story for the first time, brings such lyrical focus to his characters and his poetry that almost everything works. Even the parts that show some strain—like the film's extended hommage to Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight—are exciting for their sheer audacity. Phoenix was never better, and Reeves does his best with a part that's largely Shakespeare's Hal as filtered through Welles.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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