Paranoid Park
Stars: Gabe Nevins, Taylor Momsen
Director: Gus Van Sant
*** (out of five)
The title of Gus Van Sant�s Paranoid Park refers to a real Portland skateboarding mecca erected by homeless kids as their own private arena � a place apart from the real world.
The film, adapted from a novel by Blake Nelson, attempts to explore this sense of adolescent insularity from the inside out. Where Van Sant�s earlier, much-acclaimed Elephant stayed mostly at arms length from its high school-age protagonists, Paranoid Park plunges us into the inner life a single disaffected teen. His name is Alex (non-pro Gabe Nevins, cast via MySpace), and his head is not a safe place to be: In addition to a host of fairly identifiable problems Alex bears the psychic weight of his involvement in a horrific accidental death.
Largely eschewing the impassive, long-take style that distinguished Elephant and Last Days, Paranoid Park works as a visual and sonic collage � a wash of images and sounds that break like waves over our grateful senses. But that�s also just another way of saying the film is a wash. Its abstractions reek of calculation and also an odd kind of complacency � this meticulously evanescent film about the terror beyond youth�s limited purview seems a shade comfortable inside its own aestheticized bubble.
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