Posts Tagged ‘Gus Van Sant’

Quiet Cool

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

My favorite songs are ones that slowly build to a crescendo – David Bowie’s “Rock N’ Roll Suicide” for example – and I’ve often felt that way about movies.  I have always enjoyed the slow build, tightening the screws ever so delicately until the tension is unbearable.  Sure, there are great movies that come out firing on all cylinders right from the start, but my preference is to let things slowly sink in.  The movies of Antonioni, Rohmer, Malick, Truffaut, and Kubrick have always appealed to me because they were confident enough in their abilities to let things quietly unfold rather than explode.  The modern day filmmaker that I think employs this technique most effectively is probably Gus Van Sant; films like Paranoid Park and Elephant unfurl their narratives in an almost maddeningly oblique way.  But I find those films to be rewarding because of the work I put into trying to understand them.

This is all to say that it makes me downright giddy that there seem to be a couple films on the horizon that employ this technique.  Anton Cobijn’s The American is, according to everyone who has seen it, an Antonioni-esque exercise in languidness.  And today, I read a bunch of reviews of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere that apparently takes place in the same dreamy state as Lost in Translation.  And to me, this is the equivalent of most audiences seeing that giant wave in the trailer for The Perfect Storm.  When I hear that a movie has a deliberate pace and is compared to a director like Antonioni or Malick, that’s when I get excited.

What are some of the other great “slow-build” movies I’m missing?