My Own Private Movie Blog

A few thoughts from my first viewing of My Own Private Idaho, yesterday. Gus Van Sant is a director I've been following for years without really thinking about it. Sometimes I love his movies (Drugstore Cowboy, To Die For, Good Will Hunting) and sometimes not (Elephant, Psycho). But I always enjoy his style. Someone on Wikipedia writes (I think, accurately) that a few of Van Sant's hallmarks are: "unfulfilled romanticism, a dry sense of the absurd, and the refusal to treat homosexuality as something deserving of judgment." When his films are set in Portland I also think he evokes the area perfectly with his colors and characters.

I'm glad I finally saw Idaho. I certainly wasn't ready for it at release time (I was eleven). If you had told me that it was Keanu's follow-up to Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, I would've told you to get out of town. I also wouldn't have said at one point, "It sounds like Shakespeare!"

Here's an image from one of my favorite scenes, for obvious reasons, and a quote on River. I've used this before, because not only does it show a time when movie stars had interesting things to say and journalists could coax them out (even to a teen magazine), it also very sweetly reveals a private part of River's character. He's so good as Mike in Idaho, you can tell there's that passion--as well as drugs, unfortunately--involved.



"Once when we were fifteen, River and I went out for this fancy dinner in Manhattan and I ordered soft-shell crabs. He left the restaurant and walked around on Park Avenue, crying. I went out and said, "I love you so much. Why?" He had such a pain that I was eating an animal, that he hadn't impressed on me what was right. I loved him for that. For his dramatic desire that we share every belief, that I be with him all the way." -Martha Plimpton on River Phoenix, Cosmopolitan, April 1995.