Oh So Skateboring! (Paranoid Park (DVD))

Member Name: Praskipark

Product:	Paranoid Park (DVD)
Date:	12/10/08 (114 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting Skateboard Moves

Disadvantages: Bad acting, pretentious soundtrack and overall has a very amateurish feel to the film.

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 "documentary" scenes filmed with different camera types for cheap effect, plus a score which does not match the action, the list of this film's faults could go on forever. Finding the strong points in the movie is way more difficult.

Paranoid Park is advertised as a movie set in "skateboard subculture." The main character Alex (Gabe Nevins) and his pal Jared (Jake Miller) are fond of skateboarding and equally fond of the titular Paranoid Park, which is a semi-legal skateboarding ground set up near the city park. But that is all there is about the aforementioned subculture, unless you count having a beer or five, picking up girls, oh the sophistication of it, taking a ride in a freight car. It is during one such ride that a tragedy strikes and changes Alex's life forever. At least you are supposed to believe it does, because what you see shows no indication the young man is experiencing any serious trauma.

Consciously or not, Van Sant must have relaised he did not have much to say as a writer, as less that 30 minutes into the movie, scenes start to repeat themselves and all of a sudden the same trivial take (a character walks in a room, fills his glass with water and takes a seat behind a table) is shown again, adding nothing to the plot.

The movie cannot be even saved by Christopher Doyle, responsible for the splendid, stylish cinematography for several movies by Wong-Kar-Wai such as In the Mood for Love and Chunking Express. In Paranoid Park he provides a pretentious overkill of slow motion shots. Alex walks towards a beach in slow motion; Alex walks down a school corridor, cue the slow motion; Alex rides his skateboard, and guess what? Cut to Alex's face and eyes, no doubt to suggest his subtle, inner emotions except that nothing of what you see on the screen suggests that he has any. But then again, you cannot really blame the actors for their poor acting; most of them are amateurs picked from the skateboarding community on the MySpace website.

The makers of the movie say that searching on MySpace was the perfect way to recruit actors to play high school students. If that is the way it is, then high schools are populated by maladjusted young men who find putting together a logical sentence an ordeal and, in terms of girls, by rookie nymphomaniacs with a similar IQ. Perhaps this deliberate lack of professionalism is the stand-out feature of contemporary alternative cinema.

Conclusion

In my opinion this movie doesn't deserve all the hype it received. It is an average skater movie with a lonely, dreamy soundtrack and deals with some teen issues. It is meant to be a window into Alex's psyche but if the director had spent more time making the story more interesting and used professional actors then perhaps the film would have more credibility. The film definitely has a first time indie feel about it and to enjoy it fully you have to have empathy with the main character to understand his mindset. Unfortunately, I didn't have this empathy and in the end I felt as though I didn't really care about him at all.

If you really enjoyed Elephant then you might stand a chance of liking this film as it has a similar feel. That's about all I can say - 3 stars

Running Time 85 mins
Price £11.98 from Amazon (possibly cheaper if you shop around)
Certification 15

Summary: A Film that could have been brilliant but is oh so Boring!