Review of Paranoid Park (2007) by Guillaume L — 24 Dec 2008

In "Paranoid Park" a sixteen-year old skater kid accidentally kills a train station security guard, then chooses to keep it a secret. The film was directed by Cannes-Golden boy Gus Van Sant, and because of that it received a lot of hype at the festival.

After watching it myself though, I feel like some of the hype was unwarranted. While "Paranoid Park" is a good film, it's nowhere near a great film. Van Sant's visuals are sharp for the most part, but he relies on the "introspective slow motion shot" a bit too heavily.

The story is interesting, and the is script offers some suspense, and is overall decent. The films biggest problem comes in the actors. While it's fantastic that every kid in the film both looks and feels like an actual sixteen-year old, rather than a twenty-five year old with a close shave trying to play younger; more than a few of them couldn't act themselves out of a paper bag.

There are lines in the film so delivered so poorly that you feel like you're watching high school theater. Luckily Van Sant was smart enough to give them as few lines as possible, but this then also becomes a problem as the constant slow-motion shots of skate parks set to Elliot Smith songs gets really old, really quick.

I don't think "Paranoid Park" is awful, because it's not. It's worth a viewing, and it's a lot better than most of the mainstream releases of 2008. At the same time though, it's one of the more overrated films of the year, because it's not without its problems.