Movie Review: Paranoid Park
Oct 21st, 2008 by admin
Song of the Day: “Fuera de mi” – La Ley
- Director: Gus Van Sant
- Genre: Drama
- Year: 2007
While most people have praised Gus Van Sant for his more mainstream films like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, I personally gravitated more to his introspect, quieter film Elephant, which was as haunting as it was beautiful. Paranoid Park follows in the vein of the latter and not the former, which in my opinion is a good thing, but something which in most people’s opinion may be more difficult to enjoy.
Here, like in Elephant, GVS gives us a look into the mind of a teenage skateboarder who has been linked to a gruesome murder on the rail road tracks near Paranoid Park, a skateboard park in Portland. Told in broken segments, scrambled and out of sequence, we follow Alex as he narrates in an imperfect, compositional way, the events that have plagued his life in recent days.
Filled with long, dreamy shots, an abundance of slow motion and cinematographic quiet, GVS creates a portrait that is both troubling and peaceful alternatively. Once again–as he did in Elephant–it would seem that the director has called on a list of teenage non actors, which give the film a dose of realism, even if some of the secondary actors–Lauren McKinney, Jake Miller, I am looking in your direction–drop the ball a couple of times. While the actors certainly managed to taint the film with a few of their short comings, I can only point the finger at GVS, because they were things that could have been easily edited out or edited differently. Nevertheless, Alex, who is the main character as played by Gabe Nevins, strikes gold with his performance.
While this is not a perfect film, it is certainly a thought provoking journey into teenage angst, where numerous events collide to make, but sparing us the overly dramatic MTv crap. The way the film is narrated, like the way it is shot, adds to the mood of the feature and it seems to deal with the teenage mind in a rather honest fashion, to the point where you actually feel like smacking a few of the kids in the back of the head, they feel so real. If you are of the independent mind, able to handle slower pacing in movies, then this is a film you will most definitely enjoy.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Notes: Rated R due to a couple of disturbing scenes, language and brief, adolescent sexual content.
Quote: Macy: They should be out now, dude.
Alex: What are you talkin’ about?
Macy: The war, Iraq, no? What do you think?
Alex: I really don’t care.