Review of film: “PARANOID PARK” -- Park-ing is NOT Recommended

Review of film:   “PARANOID PARK”     --  Park-ing is NOT Recommended for “PARANOID PARK” = 

                 [ RATING:  5 of 10 stars ] 

Date Rated: Mar 13, 2008 | Rel. Date: Mar 7, 2008 =

I’ve liked a lot of work done by director Gus Van Sant. This 80+-minute endeavor, however, is NOT one of them. What some people may call “art-sy” in this film, I call SLOW-moving. It’s the sometimes interesting story of a teenage skate-boarder named Alex (GABE NEVINS) who spends a lot of time with his ’boarder friend Jared (JAKE MILLER), in part to escape the upset of his divorcing parents...

…  One day, while fooling around on a freight train near the irregular skate park, Alex causes a horrendous catastrophe. The overall story is told with loads of what I call “cascading” back-&-forth flashbacks, maddeningly wrapped inside what to me were a lot of often fuzzy-focused “dead” scenes that go “nowhere”…

…  While Gabe at times has the appropriately general spaciness of a teenager, I found too much of it akin to “sleep-walking” impassively through the story. This a not a “horrible” film, but it (and especially the “disintegrating” non-end of it) ISN’T very good…