Mala Noche - Criterion Collection
by Gus Van Sant
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Doug Cooeyate, Nyla McCarthy, Ray Monge, Sam Downey, Tim StreeterDirector: Gus Van Sant
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 78 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-10-09
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of Mala Noche - Criterion Collection
Movie Review: The best first feature ever made
Summary: 5 Stars
This is without doubt the best debut feature film ever made. All the quirky genius and gentle, eccentric brilliance of Van Sant's later works are here in full force. Everything about it is excellent: the cinematography, the dialog, the characters, and all performances, particularly Tim Streeter's astonishingly sweet, innocent, believable, likable, accessible, and heartbreaking Walt. Man, do I wish he'd kept making movies after this one.
Thank God for The Criterion Collection! Not only do they issue high-quality resurrections of long-lost gems like Mala Noche, but they do it without a single FBI warning screen or forced-down-your-throat trailer for junk you don't want to see. You get the movie and usually great extras, and that's it.
The extras on this DVD are a mixed bag. The interview with Van Sant is a treasure, but the tedious documentary featurette (not made by Van Sant) about the boring Walt Curtis, who wrote the book, mainly proves that Van Sant can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Van Sant toyed with the idea of having Curtis play himself in the movie, and I'm very, very glad he chose Streeter instead.
Summary of Mala Noche - Criterion Collection
With its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, Gus Van Sant's debut feature Mala Noche heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film. Set in Van Sant's hometown of Portland, Oregon, the film evokes a world of transient workers, dead-end day-shifters, and bars and seedy apartments bathed in a profound nighttime, as it follows a romantic deadbeat with a wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant. Mala Noche was an important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and is a fascinating time capsule from a time and place that continues to haunt its director's work.The first thing that strikes you about Mala Noche is the raw, beautiful cinematography--a high-contrast black-and-white that captures the gutters of Portland, OR, like the setting of a long-lost film noir. Next, you'll be struck that the narrator, a convenience clerk named Walt (Tim Streeter), rhapsodizes about his love for a young Mexican hustler named Johnny (Doug Cooeyate) without guilt or fear--perhaps reflecting the rare occasion of a movie by an openly gay filmmaker (Gus Van Sant, making his feature film debut) based on an openly gay autobiographical story (by Portland poet Walt Curtis). Though the movie doesn't have much of a plot--basically, Walt alternately tries to woo Johnny and his friend Roberto Pepper (Ray Monge), gaining little more than a suspicious, combative friendship and some fervid but isolated sex--but the rough but engaging flavor of the storytelling gives the movie momentum and a rich charm. The Criterion edition features two splendid extras: First, a low-key, unpretentious interview with Van Sant (who notes that the movie had the spontaneous and low-tech spirit of the Dogme 95 movement, though made several years earlier); and a ramshackle, pugnacious documentary by Portland-born animator Bill Plympton (I Married a Strange Person!) about Walt Curtis, who proclaims himself a "jerk-off poet therapist." If there is a Portland aesthetic, this compilation captures it. --Bret Fetzer
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