Movie for the Day--Billy Shakespeare's BDAY

So, I could maybe find any reason, in any round-about-way, to make My Own Private Idaho the movie for the day. It is one of my favorite movies and keeping this bias in mind I will go ahead and thrust it upon you today, April 20.

Okay, so many of you might be saying (or none of you) the first Romeo and Juliet, no no no the second one with Leo. Or, even fewer of you might be saying the Hamlet (2000) with Etan Hawke. Okay, maybe I was just thinking that. But, who am I kidding, what it boils down to is that I wanted to write a blog about My Own Private Idaho. Shakespeare is just another dead, white, heterosexual, formulaic, man.

So, Idaho, although it does not stricly follow the narrative of King Lear it is close enough for me. I mean, when street boy gigolo's break into Shakespeare it must be a conscious allusion, and with this film I think Bill would have been extremely proud. It is about taking the life issues of the people commonly disregarded as the filth of society and making their issues universal and worth considering, "I mean it is old english it must be intellectual," says the aforementioned disregarder.

Gus Van Sant has two preoccupations in his films. Sexuality and family. And, often times the families he chooses to focus on are not the biological families, but surrogate families. Families of street riff raff who fled from home and can only find comfort in the companionship of one another, and can only find a means to a living by sleeping with whoever happens to offer the best fix.

Van Sant never judges his characters only portrays them as what they are, there are no bad guys and there are no good guys, there are only people motivated to act by a desperate need to be recognized and loved by someone.

WARNING: This is Van Sant before Good Will Hunting. This is the real Van Sant, the experimental Van Sant, the best Van Sant.