NYFF podcast. Paranoid Park.

In this podcast from the New York Film Festival, Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis talk with Amy Taubin (Film Comment, Sight & Sound, the list goes on) about Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (site). To download or listen, click here.

"Paranoid Park is a wondrous cinematic transfusion of the mindstate of a destabilized youth, a shuffling, eerily smooth, disynchronous impression of a clouded mind dazed by a terrifying, momentary glimpse of sin, of responsibility, and of a world outside himself," writes Daniel Kasman.

"While my initial reaction to Elephant was lukewarm, Paranoid Park, albeit not overburdened with a recent, polarizing national incident, struck me as a tighter, more intricate meditation on teenage oblivion," writes Jenny Jediny at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "It is undoubtedly more accessible than Van Sant's recent work, particularly the haunting and often impermeable Last Days, but by no means does this detract from Paranoid Park's potency as an absorbing, brief impression of a rash action and its aftermath."

"As usual, van Sant is long on style and short on ideas," writes Jürgen Fauth. "Characters remain types because too much time is spent showing them take extended showers, riding the halfpipe, and going up escalators in the mall. Paranoid Park is pretentious in the worst sense of the word: there's nothing going on beneath the artful surface, and the kid's dilemma generates yawns instead of heat."

"Teenagers don't just have secrets - they are secrets, and Van Sant is becoming a maestro at effecting that concept on screen, particularly in this latest, impressionistic meditation on the (often dangerous) tension between the transience of youth and its utter eternity to those still locked in its suburban grasp," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, Toronto and NYFF.

Updates, 10/1: "Gus Van Sant finally crawls out from under his Béla Tarr-inspired long-take detachment and dares to explore an interior landscape in ways not seen since My Own Private Idaho," writes Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door. "Indeed, the privacy of this film - a reflection of its insular protagonist - is what puts the shockingly violent death that haunts its sinuous narrative a league apart from those in Van Sant's most recent work."

"The films in Van Sant's recent long-take trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days) took sensationalistic news stories from real life and then stripped them of all causality, as a way of portraying human activity as essentially random and undetermined," writes Akiva Gottlieb at Slant. "But Paranoid Park is a deeper and even more bracing step into the unknown for the veteran filmmaker, a fully subjective probe into the consciousness of a young man and a generous display of artistic empathy."

Updates, 10/14: "There is a palpable sentiment of trying to capture the ephemeral that runs through Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, a film that further modulates his now familiar aesthetic of melding abstract episodes of hypnotic time drift with the alienated portrait of imploding, angry youth that have characterized his more recent films (beginning with his Béla Tarr epiphany film, Gerry)," writes acquarello.

"Doubling as a stand-in for the viewer, Alex is only able to maintain a real connection to himself (his emotions, his safety, his identity) in the face of horror by keeping his memory of it locked away from others, thus alienating himself from the rest of the world; and yet this secret grants him a unique fascination, the allure that makes him a subject for the camera and its audience," writes Ryan at culturemonkey.

Update, 10/16: For Michael Joshua Rowin, writing for Stop Smiling, this one's "a step back from his mostly excellent Death Trilogy."

Posted by dwhudson at October 8, 2007 1:52 AM