Product Description

An unsolved murder at Portland's infamous Paranoid Park brings detectives to a local high school, propelling a young skater into a moral dilemma where he must deal with the consequences of his own actions. As director of My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, To Die For and Elephant, Gus Van Sant has created some of the most memorable stories about youth ever committed to film. New York Press says Paranoid Park boasts "the coolest pop score since Pulp Fiction " and the film was shot by the acclaimed cinematographer Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love, The Quiet American). Paranoid Park also features a cast of hot newcomers including Gabe Nevins and "Gossip Girl's" Taylor Momsen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16711 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-10-07
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 85 minutes

Amazon.com
It's hard to believe that a middle-aged filmmaker can fully evoke the chaotic, anxious world of a troubled teenager, but that's what Gus Van Sant has done with Paranoid Park. Alex (newcomer Gabe Nevins), a teenaged boy whose parents are going through a difficult divorce, is drawn to the rough community that's built up around the titular skateboarding park in Portland, Ore. One night, when an older boy is showing him how to hop a freight train, Alex accidentally kills a security guard. The movie captures the before and after by looping back and forth in time, focusing far more closely on Alex's state of mind than the investigation that threatens to close around him. Filmgoers leery of the drawn-out, atmospheric sequences of Van Sant's recent films (like Gerry and Last Days) need not fear; though Paranoid Park favors mood over plot, it successfully balances character, mood, and story, resulting in considerable dramatic tension, similar to Van Sant's meditation on the Columbine shootings, Elephant. This is not a thriller; Paranoid Park pays as much attention to Alex's relationship with his girlfriend Jennifer (Taylor Momsen, Gossip Girl) as to the killing. The result is a vivid, compelling portrait of adolescence, in all its messiness and confusion. This may be Van Sant's best film since his early masterpieces, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews

Guilt as Grim Reaper
Alex, the narrarator and protagonist of "Paranoid Park", is not your typical romanticised culluloid teen. He is quiet, introspective, and near mute when it comes to verbalizing his feelings. He is the antithesis of a sullen, vapid adolescent skater. On the contrary, I found his parents to be vapid. When he speaks to them, what they say hardly makes an impact, because their efforts to really get through to him are ineffective. It's like carrying out an inane conversation with a stranger in which nothing is really said. Pleasantries are exchanged, but little beyond superficial subjects is broached.
The aftershock of a gruesome accident has left Alex shell-shocked. The entire film is about the way guilt haunts him like a shadowy executioner. Close-ups of his friends' faces emphasize the way he searches their expressions for the slightest hint of accusation. Alex lives in a world that offers little joy. His parents are getting divorced, and he has dislocated himself to the lonely confines of a journal. The journal is his confidante, his only witness to paralyzing emotions that stalk him during his waking hours.
Alex's character is not glorified in any way. He is awkward like most teens, he is not an expert skateboarder, and is reluctant to venture down the concrete slopes of the skate park carved under a colossal bridge. He is drawn toward Paranoid park because he seeks something resembling companionship and family. Jumping a boxcar leads to a fatal and grisly accident. Alex must live with the consequences of this mistake, which leads to intriguing questions about morality and the complexities of unintentional manslaughter. Gus Van Sant is not interested in the cogs of the judicial system, however, he is interested in the tormented machinery ticking away inside the young skater's head. Every aspect of reality is overshadowed by shame.
A scene in which Alex dissociates in a hot shower was compelling because every part of his body seemed to be weeping, except for his eyes, as if they were afraid to betray his secret. He wanders through gloomy rooms, turning on lights almost as an afterthought. When he has sex with his girlfriend, he does so in a stupor. Immediately afterward, she gets up and brags to her friend on the phone that it was "fantastic". To Alex it did little to penetrate the numbness soaking his body. A nimble detective questions him in a way that makes him suspect if he is found guilty, a vast nothing will swallow him. Faces and eyes and vague gestures judge him at every opportunity. Bizarre music in the background informs us that Alex is supposed to be feeling happy or sad, but his facial expression remains flat; incapable of smiling.
Gabe Nevins is an expressive actor who captures Alex's blank affect perfectly. He has an extremely difficult task in trying to capture Alex's mental state through posture and facial expressions, rather than simple words. His relationships with family and friends are so meaningless he has no one to confess to, so he buries his suffering to keep from being injured by emotions that are unfamiliar and threatening. Many will complain that the film moves at a snail's pace, but I think this is intentional: the director is submerging us in Alex's psyche, his dread and depression making situations slog by as if mired in quicksand.

Paranoid Indeed
Paranoid Park is Gus Van Sant's twelfth feature film, and the third in his recent films about disaffected youth. Adapted from a novel by Portland writer Blake Nelson and obviously inspired by Crime and Punishment, Paranoid Park follows the life Alex, a local skate punk who gets tangled up in a grisly accident.

The thin plot has Alex, played by Gabe Nevins, attracted to Paranoid Park, a skate park that was built illegally by punks, skaters, and other riff raff. Alex goes there one night alone, and is essentially picked up by some shady characters. Without spoiling anything, he does something terrible and spends the rest of the movie trying to cope, mainly by writing out what happened in a letter to one of his friends. Paranoid Park represents a place where Alex feels that he can belong. He expresses how much he's attracted to the type of people who skate there, and he yearns to belong to their subculture, yet he never manages to find his place.

His writing literally drives the plot, as what he's writing down in his letter is what we experience as an audience. The focus of Paranoid Park is decidedly insular. Built around a series of disorienting techniques like dialogue overlaid with music, one sided dialogues where the other person is either obscured or off camera all together, long takes of Alex walking alone with a musical backdrop, and close-ups of Alex's blank stare, Alex's inner life is shown as a sort of dreamy and hazy numbness. His disaffection and guilt is not really expressed very effectively even in his diary, and the visual techniques of the film serve as one of the only windows in to his mind set.

Just like Elephant and Last Days, Van Sant is concerned with the seemingly existential existence of modern young people. Not only is Alex not coping too well with his deed despite his journal confession, he's also not coping with his parents divorce, and not coping with his superficial and sexual forward girlfriend. He can't express himself at all. A breakdown of language is a well trodden theme in existential literature, and the characters in Paranoid Park don't do a whole heck of a lot of communicating. Particularly evident is Alex's trouble communicating with the females in his life. He can't talk to his mother, whose face isn't even seen except as a hazy outline, he can't talk to his girlfriend Jennifer and feels nothing towards her, or his friend Macy who urges him to open up, yet he can't bring himself to share his secret with her even if it would have helped. Alex doesn't share his feelings or what happened, and he ends up being a depressed and blank teenager who'll end up being a dysfunctional adult, just like his parents.

Paranoid Park works well as an experimental take on a Crime and Punishment style story about inner torment. Most of the actors were found on myspace with the exception of Taylor Momsen as Alex's girlfriend Jennifer, who surprisingly enough plays a sexual forward young girl on Gossip Girl. Nevins is good as Alex, who's main job is to act like a typical teenager and to show off a numbed exterior. The acting isn't stellar but it's authentic enough. There might be a bit too much of the solitary slow motion shots of Alex, and maybe a bit too much style or substance with all of the arty and experimental camera work. When Van Sant shows us the fifth or sixth slow motion walking shot of Alex overlayed with Elliott Smith or Nino Rota it got a little tiresome. The pace is also very slow, which might turn off some folks wanting a more driven plot.

This is Van Sant's best effort in a long time, and it's definitely worth seeing if you can tolerate a little introspection and a slow pace.

Don't Trust Me- Read Some Real Reviews
There are 2 well known aggregate movie review sites, MetaCritic and Rotten Tomatoes that would give this film an average of 4 stars out of 5. (The NY Times review in particular is dead on, imho.) The 1 star "total bomb" reviews here are completely out of sync with accepted opinion of Paranoid Park.

Obviously, it's not for everyone. It is more for those that could appreciate Elephant or 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days than someone looking for an action skater flick. But it will go down as one of Gus Van Sant's best films in what is already a distinguished career. It's one of the most beautiful movies of recent years and the score and sound mixing is stupendous. But it takes some time and attitude adjustment to get into the flow with the film. It's well worth the time and almost demands multiple viewings.

As with Elephant, many of the young actors are novices at best. This is not a drawback at all. It only enhances the movie because the characters are so real.

Did I say it's one of the most beautiful films of recent years? Slow motion skaters, the train scene scored to a key passage from Beethoven's 9th, the shower scene, the beach, beautiful boys, beautiful girls, not so beautiful girls, losing ones virginity- all in beautiful slow motion scenes told out of sequence, often with no dialog and sometimes repeated to underscore certain points. Two signature Elliott Smith songs, played almost in their entirety, accompany two long and unedited shots of the title character to create two more memorable moments.

One of the best of 2007 and deservedly so...