Paranoid Park

Movies are art. Skate movies are art for skaters. Gus Van Sant movies are art for people with a lot of time on their hands. Gus Van Sant Skate movies? Double art.

I've just finished watching Paranoid Park. It's canny good, like. It's a film about a 16 year old skater who gets caught up in a murder investigation centred around a skate park.

One thing I will say about the film, and it is that it is incredibly short. It lacks depth, on a Van Sant scale of Gerry/Last Days to Elephant/Good Will Hunting, it stands perfectly in the middle. It has the values of Elephant, the young shaggy-haired quiet boy who gets caught up in something, but the drawn-out shots and quiet soundtracking of Last Days and Gerry. The story lasts 40 minutes of the 84 minute feature, give or take 5 minutes. When the story is focussed on, it is disjointed and you sometimes get lost in chronology. It is a good story, but you can tell the novel it is screenplayed from is teenage fiction. There is off-kilter narration that cuts in and out, led by the voice of our protagonist Alex. The way he reads is the way he is supposed to have written the story down, simple and unintelligently. Verbal mistakes aren't airbrushed over as they possibly should be, they are noticably 'rugged' but don't really...I dunno...they work but don't wash with me somehow.

I did have a few problems with the film. You don't really feel that much sympathy for Alex for getting caught up in the violence, but mainly due to, again, the lack of story-telling. Van Sant focusses on making the film look more stylistically like a skate movie (There is a little section where a detective is passing a business card to Alex, and when doing so he flicks it around and it made me smile a bit). The camera often trails the characters, much like it would in a skate film, and there are obviously little vignettes of skating pressed within the film itself. The name itself, Paranoid Park, falls short due to the lack of sympathy, you don't feel that he's too uncomfortable. I don't know whether it's the acting, but I doubt it.

Things I liked about it was nearly everything but the lack of story. Gus Van Sant is one stylish motherfucker. He knows how to frame a shot, how to colour it and how to make you feel warm and cold through your screen. I shouldn't complain about lack of story because a lot of Van Sant's outings are more visual than aural. Gerry and Elephant, for example, contrasting pieces that I have very different views on, but neither tell deep stories. Good Will Hunting, on the other hand, has more story but is still more about the dialogue.

I'll stop ranting. If you're a Van Sant fan, and can cope with his slower work, then this will up the ante since Last Days. It's a better film, but will still never beat Elephant in his indie work. If you're a regular film-goer you might grow bored of the constant cuts away from dialogue, and the lack of depth.

ps I always forget My Own Private Idaho. That is a masterpiece.