Paranoid Park: Better in a Museum Than a Multiplex

As a piece of art, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park has a lot to recommend it. It's carefully told and beautifully rendered, and it establishes an instant mood of fearfulness and dread. Van Sant proved with Elephant, his 2003 film about a school shooting, that he knows how to tap into the creepiness of the everyday ? dishes clanging in a sink, a light switching on in a far-away room ? and Paranoid Park uses those haunting moments to their full effect. It's the sort of film I could see playing in a constant loop in the multimedia wing of a modern art museum.

As a commercial movie, though, Paranoid Park doesn't quite add up. With non-professional actors playing many of the roles, the film has an unusual authenticity ? but it also has a distracting amateurish quality. And though it's just 85 minutes long, Paranoid Park still has too much space, with too much time spent on skateboarding shots and too little spent on teasing out the main character's emotions.

The film, adapted from author Blake Nelson's young-adult novel of the same name, focuses on Alex (Gabe Nevins), a high school skateboarder who finds himself drawn to the edgy crowd at a local skate park ? the illegal, dangerous Paranoid Park ? as his parents' marriage is falling apart and his girlfriend (Taylor Momsen of Gossip Girl) starts pressuring him to have sex. Told through flashbacks that follow the narration from a letter Alex is writing, the film focuses on the buildup to and aftermath of one traumatic event: the night that Alex accidentally kills a security guard and decides not to tell anyone. But that's just the plot, so to hear more of my take, just

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