Paranoid Park Filmed in Portland

This past weekend saw the Portland release of Paranoid Park, a new film written and directed by local treasure Gus Van Sant. To many Portland cinephiles, a new Gus Van Sant film, especially one shot almost entirely in Portland, is nothing short of an event. Over the years, we have come to expect a certain grit and anonymity from a Van Sant vehicle (sans mainstream ventures like Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting, etc), as if no matter where he films, he feels he has to singlehandedly bear the cross of Portland’s art-damaged counter-culture, or at least the stereotypes associated with it. His last couple films, Elephant and Last Days, explored the social mythology behind recent “world-shaking” Gen-X/Gen Y events: Columbine and the suicide of Kurt Cobain. It was almost as if these were films he had to make, events he had to comment on through his art. They were his obsessions. The result of these projects were two beautiful and beautifully detached films. With Paranoid Park, we find an older, perhaps wiser, and certainly more contemplative creator. Without compromising any of his signature grit, Gus Van Sant has crafted a deceptively simple, fully-realized art film that doesn’t have to comment on anything or protect itself through its own conceits. It is free to just be itself. Which, not suprisingly, makes it more of a Portland film than any other I can think of.

Paranoid Park tracks the physical and inner turmoil of a teenage skateboarder (Gabe Nevins) following a tragic event which turns his world upside down. It is showing exclusively at Cinema 21 (616 NW 21st), an independent art-house theater in Portland’s Nob Hill neighborhood. Through March 27, the showtimes are 7:00 and 8:55 pm; and from March 28 through April 3 it shows nightly at 7:45 and 9:25 (plus Saturday and Sunday at 12:15, 2:00).