8th
Coming Soon to a TV Near You, March 8 - 14, 2010

Paranoid Park (IFC, Sunday, March 14, 4:15am, 9:30am, 3:30pm)
Disaffected youth is the métier of Gus Van Sant. Beginning with his 1989 feature-length debut, Drugstore Cowboy, and continuing through 2003’s Elephant, the Portland, Oregon-based filmmaker has poked and prodded teen dispirit. Paranoid Park, a Van Sant ode to callow young people, is a sort of Crime and Punishment for skaters. Artsy and emotionally remote on occasion, the film is not for all tastes — but viewers with a more eclectic bent are likely to find it strangely spellbinding.
The title refers to a renegade skate park underneath a Portland bridge, but it could just as easily describe the state of mind of Alex (Gabe Nevins), the film’s protagonist. The troubled teen harbors a terrible secret, one that revolves around the skate park. Van Sant builds tensions slowly, releasing dribbles and drips of information alluding to the horror that this sullen teen has bottled up. Alex explains to us in voiceover — his narration is taken from a journal he keeps - that he is introduced to Paranoid Park by an older friend (Jake Miller) and immediately feels a kinship with the dead-end kids who hang there. “No matter how bad your family life was,” Alex recounts blandly, “these guys had it much worse.” Then something happens one rainy night when Alex visits the park by himself. What transpires is as gruesome as it is tragic.
Van Sant’s work in recent years has become increasingly oblique, but the off-kilter, hypnotic tone of Paranoid Park feels somehow appropriate. It jumps around in time, its fractured nonlinear narrative mimicking the itinerant moves and twists of a skateboarder. — Phil Bacharach