The scene this picture is taken from is three and a half minutes long and is ONLY this boy walking down the hall of his school in slow motion. Bullshit.
Yesterday was an important day. Yesterday I went to the Ritzy with some friends who were off to see the deeply anticlimactic "I Am Legend". To kill some time, I went to see "Paranoid Park" instead of sitting in the lounge area judging the people who sit around down there sipping red wine and wearing scarves indoors.
The opening shot of the film gave me hope. Hope that was snatched from me like the anal virginity of a first-time offender in an American jail. Let me begin by stating that I actually like Gus Van Sant's work. He's made some excellent films ("Drugstore Cowboy", "To Die For" and "Elephant" are all brilliant). Even when he's mediocre, he's still capable of cranking out audience-pleasing material ("Good Will Hunting"). I went to "Paranoid Park" because it looked promising. Like "Elephant", it supposedly explores the murky waters of adolescence. Unlike "Elephant", however, it is an unremitting cockfest that left me gasping for air that didn't reek of bullshit.
I have plenty of love for the avant-garde, but the problem with "Paranoid Park" is that it reproduces the conventions of arthouse cinema with none of the substance. Using non-actors in principal roles has been successfully employed in the past by directors like Peter Watkins ("Punishment Park", "The War Game") and Neil Jordan ("The Butcher Boy"), but in "Paranoid Park" the non-actors on show possess no earthy charm or raw magnetism. The actors in the film are bland American youth, expressionless and incapable of delivering lines as basic as "What did you do on Saturday?" with even the slightest conviction. The fact that van Sant got them off of Myspace just shows that the quality of the gold depends entirely on the quality and depth of the mine. In my opinion, the awfulness of the film is probably due to the fact that his "actors" gave him so little useful footage that he had to put together long segments of slow motion, meaningless drivel to tie the paper-thin plot together.
Which brings us to the plot. By the time the viewer actually finds out what the story of the film is (approximately halfway in) any desire to find out what happens to the characters has been dissolved by the acid bath of constantly abrasive sound design, repetitive slow motion (in at least four places literally repeating the same shot/dialogue) and the bludgeoning assumption by the director that shooting things out of focus or while playing with the iris automatically makes the film edgy and artistic.
Luckily, I didn't have any popcorn with me or I would have thrown it at the screen in a fit of rage. A director as talented as van Sant and a DP as talented as Christopher Doyle should surely be able to make a film that is at the very least watchable, a bench mark that they sadly fall short of with this effort.
After meeting my friends in the lobby, we went home, ate pasta and watched "Network", a movie that actually has something to say and says it well. Hopefully, when Gus van Sant crawls back out of his own ass, he will also have something worth saying to put onscreen.
This film receives no stars. Surprise, surprise.
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