Paranoid Park (DVD)

Paranoid park is a Drama that delves into the mind of a teen who tries to distance himself after an inccedent. The film starring a lot of unknowns is flawless in its depictation of teenagers and the script is full of great dialouge that you would hear and see on the streets today. Alex is a young teen who's actions has caused an incident with a security gaurd. Alex tries to deal with whats happened through writing and we see on screen how he deals with the actions and how he tries to distance himself from the said event. I dont want to spoil the film and want to leave the plot out but paranoid park is a sucess on screen. The youths of the film a ...  Read the complete review

note: also appears on my film review website, ShaunMunro.co.uk, thanks! It's old school, it's retrograde, it's Paranoid Park - the latest outing from Gus Van Sant. Accompanied by an array of grainy handheld shots of various young persons skateboarding, we learn that Paranoid Park is essentially the skateboarding Mecca, and that "nobody was ever ready for it", least of all troubled teenager Alex (Gabe Nevins). I am always sure to be highly sceptical of films that seem to be trying far too hard to retain a "hip" quality, and from the moment we were introduced to a teacher who sounded very much like the skateboarders he was ...  Read the complete review

At last year's Cannes festival, Paranoid Park was nominated for the Golden Palm, the main prize, but ended up with just the minor 60th Anniversary Award and even that is hard to comprehend. Gus Van Sant, the director who nabbed an Oscar nomination for Good Will Hunting and won a Golden Palm for Elephant, has delivered an artificially stretched out film school exercise. This film could, at best, be an entry in a competition at the end of the first year at a second-rate film school and then only if there was a dearth of competition from more talented student directors. A boring script co-written by Van Sant, colourless characters, silly dialogue and forced ...  Read the complete review