Paranoid Park.

"Despite the fictional narrative of Paranoid Park, the aesthetic problem that [Gus] Van Sant is grappling with here is precisely that of portraits, whether painted or photographed, in which the subject is anonymous: How does the artist represent the exterior so that it speaks to the mystery of interiority? And whose interiority - the artist's or the subject's?" Amy Taubin, who discussed this "exceptionally delicate, refined, and affecting piece of poetic neorealism" briefly with Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis last fall when it it screened at the New York Film Festival, in Artforum.

Blake Nelson, author of the novel, talks with Van Sant in the New York Times.

Updated through 3/8.

"Parents just don't understand, but, surprisingly, the older dude who found you through MySpace and asked you to be in his movie really does," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine. "Gus Van Sant's interest in amateur teen actors and their flawless complexions has occasionally seemed prurient, but his Paranoid Park, cast partly via the website that enables every kid with a cell phone cam to strike a pose, peeks out from the wings at adolescent cultural play-acting."

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, Toronto and the NYFF.

Update, 3/2: "What most likely would have been a cluttered mish-mash in the hands of an overly cerebral director becomes a poetic revelation with visceral Van Sant at its helm," writes Lauren Wissot.

Update, 3/3: "Paranoid Park is a supernaturally perfect fusion of Van Sant's current conceptual-art-project head-trip aesthetic and Blake Nelson's finely tuned first-person 'young adult' novel," writes David Edelstein in New York. "To enjoy Paranoid Park fully, you need to be both preternaturally alert and totally relaxed - to be attentive but not fixated, to catch Van Sant's tiny clues yet be open enough to bring your own experience of the world to bear on what you're seeing."

Update, 3/4: Movie Poster Addict invites a comparison between one Paranoid poster and another for My Own Private Idaho.

Updates, 3/5: Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE: "By Last Days Van Sant had mastered the [Béla] Tarr template and in the process made it his own; with Paranoid Park he's starting to reinvent himself yet again, but just as Gerry was an interesting but awkward first attempt in creating significant distance from late 90s commercial efforts like Good Will Hunting and the remade Psycho, so may Park ultimately prove a transitional step into gradually more assured territory."

"Van Sant's cinematic eye has always unabashedly been focused on slender, sexually ambiguous adolescents, and his adoration of uncommunicative kids with limited vocabularies and awesome hair is beginning to wear a little thin." So Alonso Duralde, writing for MSNBC, is looking forward to Milk.

"The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker's career," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor."

Nick Schager talks with cinematographer Christopher Doyle for the IFC.

For Evan Davis, this is "Gus Van Sant's Newest Masterpiece."

Updates, 3/7: The New York Times' Manohla Dargis finds Paranoid Park "a haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth. Like most of Mr Van Sant's films Paranoid Park is about bodies at rest and in motion, and about longing, beauty, youth and death, and as such as much about the artist as his subject. It is a modestly scaled triumph without a false or wasted moment."

"Gus Van Sant wins the Most Attitudinizing Filmmaker in America Prize for Paranoid Park," declares Armond White in the New York Press.

"It's a film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy at their center," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

Updates, 3/8: Justin Stewart for Stop Smiling: "It would be greedy to expect, every five years, a shift as drastic and provocative as his own from Finding Forrester to Gerry, but with its perfectly content existence as a remake of recent achievements, Paranoid Park is essentially his (the new Van Sant's) Finding Forrester, as absurd as that might sound. We can hope that someday it will be similarly looked back on as an okay interim between fertile stretches."

"Van Sant here juggles time with an assuredness that brings to mind Resnais and sometimes even Hitchcock, and it isn't all for show," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

Two takes at the House Next Door: Kevin Lee and Zachary Wigon.

Posted by dwhudson at March 1, 2008 1:31 PM