Paranoid Park(2008)- User Reviews

The famous experimental film director Jean-Luc Godard once said: "Every film should have a beginning, a middle, and an ending, but not necessarily in that order." Godard's films (as I remember) had very little story, and unless you were interested in the characters, they were terribly boring. Since they were about the relationships of heterosexual adults (and French at that), I didn't find them very interesting.

But if Godard had made a color film about a teenage skateboarder with a moral crisis, this might have been it.

(Mild spoiler alert). There's really only one thing that happens in all of this movie, "Paranoid Park." The rest of the movie tries, often without words, to express the main character's feelings about that event. And not surprisingly, the story is never resolved, at least not in the traditional sense.

So the movie lives or dies on how you feel about the main character. Even before "the event," Alex is a very melancholy kid. Nothing affects him and nothing makes him happy. And yet, the character (very well acted by Gabe Nevins), is haunting in a way that I don't think I'll forget him for quite a while.

Had "Paranoid Park" been a Godard film, he might have dragged it out for 2 1/2 hours. Mercifully, Van Sant cuts it off at 85 minutes, sparing us another hour of "nothing happening." But I imagine it would have been a beautiful hour of nothing happening, had it been filmed.

Yahoo Movies describes the "B+" rating as "Memorable," and frankly, I can't think of a better word to describe this film.

It's worth saying something about the aspect ratio: Although some theatres may have shown the film in 1:1.85 (modest widescreen), and the BluRay disc is in 1:1.67 (Euro widescreen), the DVD is in 1:1.33 (old-fashion TV shape). At first, this would appear to be a mistake, but apparently, Van Sant intended for the film to be shown this way, perhaps imitating a 16mm indie movie. I took the extra trouble of watching the DVD on my old Sony TV so that the picture would fill the screen but still be in the right shape, and I would say, the compositions were very tight, in the sense, that cutting off the top and bottom of the picture would have cut a lot off the image. So, although you can crop it into 1:1.85 if you have a widescreen TV, I wouldn't recommend it. On the other hand, I think the movie would have benefited from having more information on the sides of the picture, ie, a traditional widescreen composition.

--Gary