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Paranoid Park (film)
Encyclopedia
Paranoid Park is a 2007 American drama film
written and directed by Gus Van Sant
. The film is based on the novel of the same name
by Blake Nelson
and takes place in Portland
, Oregon
. It stars Gabe Nevins
as a teenage skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard.
Van Sant wrote the draft script in two days after reading and deciding to adapt Nelson's novel. To cast the film's youths, Van Sant posted an opening casting call on social networking website MySpace
inviting teenagers to audition for speaking roles, as well as experienced skateboarders to act as extras
. Filming began in October 2006 and took place at various locations in and around Portland. Scenes at the fictional Eastside Skatepark were filmed at Burnside Skatepark
which was, like Eastside, built illegally by skateboarders.
Paranoid Park premiered on May 21, at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival
and was given a limited release
on March 7, 2008. It grossed over US$
4,481,000 from its $3 million budget. The film received mostly positive reviews; some praised the direction and cinematography in particular, though others believed the film to be overly stylized and slow paced. It won one Independent Spirit Award, two Boston Society of Film Critics
awards and the Cannes Film Festival's special 60th anniversary
prize.
), a 16-year-old skateboarder, rides a freight train clandestinely with a man named Scratch (Scott Patrick Green
) whom he has just met at the Eastside Skatepark, known as "Paranoid Park". While the train is moving a security guard (John Burrowes) notices the pair, chases after them, and tries to get them off by hitting Scratch with his flashlight. During the melee, Alex hits him with his skateboard and the guard, losing balance, falls onto another track into the path of an oncoming freight train which cuts him in half. Alex tries to destroy some of the evidence. For example, he throws his skateboard into the Willamette River
from the Steel Bridge
, and when he arrives at his friend Jared's (Jake Miller) house, he showers and disposes of the clothes he had been wearing.
Alex is later questioned at school by Detective Richard Lu (Daniel Liu), as are several other students who had been skateboarding on the night in question. It is revealed that the police have recovered Alex's skateboard, though they have not traced it back to him, and have identified DNA
evidence which places the skateboard at the scene of the security guard's death.
Throughout the film Alex keeps the incident to himself, and does not confide in anyone else. After having impassive sex with his girlfriend, Jennifer (Taylor Momsen
), he breaks up with her. Another of his friends, Macy (Lauren McKinney), notices that he is worried about something. She advises him to write down whatever is bothering him as a cathartic
release if nothing else. He initially rejects the idea, but eventually writes an account around which the story and its narration are based. After completing the written account, Alex burns it.
American author Blake Nelson
's novel Paranoid Park
into a film of the same name because it was set in his hometown of Portland
, Oregon
, because he was an amateur skateboarder himself and because he found the story particularly interesting. At the time that he first read the novel, he was accumulating the finances for another film, but abandoned the project and decided instead to write a screenplay based on Nelson's story. His first draft of the script was written in two days, and the final draft was just 33 pages long.
Similar to his 2003 film Elephant, Van Sant sought non-professional young actors to play the main roles, and so created a page for the film on social networking site MySpace
. On the page, he posted an open casting call for males and females aged 14–18 who were "skaters, honor roll [students], cheerleaders, punks, drama kids, musicians, artists, student council [members], athletes, award winners, class skippers, photographers, band members, leaders, followers, shy kids, class clowns". Two audition sessions were held on August 3 and August 5, 2006, as well as an additional casting call for experienced skateboarders to act as extras
in the film; a total of 2,971 people auditioned. Gabe Nevins
, having never acted before, heard about the casting call from a skateboard store and originally auditioned as an extra. Nevins was cast in the lead role, which he says was based on his innocence that Van Sant believed trained actors to be lacking. Jake Miller, originally from Boise, Idaho
, was on a road trip
in Portland when he heard about the casting call and decided to audition with his friends. Taylor Momsen
was a professional actor beforehand and received the Paranoid Park script through her agent. She won the role after sending her taped audition to Van Sant. The film features two cameo appearance
s: Alex's father is played by professional skateboarder Jay "Smay" Williamson, and his uncle is played by the film's cinematographer Christopher Doyle
. Most of the actors wore their own clothes and wrote some of their characters' dialogue to maintain a sense of authenticity.
Principal photography
began in Oregon in October 2006. Filming locations included Portland State University
, the Steel Bridge
, St. Johns Bridge
, Lloyd Center
, Madison High School
and Van Sant's own beach house. Scenes at the fictional Eastside Skatepark were filmed at Portland's Burnside Skatepark
, which was, like Eastside, built illegally by skateboarders and subsequently approved by the city as a public skatepark. Van Sant said that his request to film at Burnside was treated with some suspicion by the park's users, as "What none of them wanted was for us to portray a corny image of the park." Cinematographer Christopher Doyle
shot parts of the film with a wide-angle lens
that is used to shoot skate videos. The film's skateboarding sequences were shot on Super 8 mm film
, a medium commonly used in skate videos, and the remainder of the film was shot on 35 mm film
, Van Sant's medium of choice.
. The film was subsequently screened at the Auckland International Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival
, Toronto International Film Festival
, Athens Film Festival, Raindance Film Festival
, New York Film Festival
, Vienna International Film Festival and the Oslo Films from the South Festival before its theatrical release. Its international tour of the festival circuit continued after its U.S. release, and it was screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Portland International Film Festival, London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
, Transilvania International Film Festival
, Midnight Sun Film Festival
and the Cinepur Choice Film Festival.
Paranoid Park was given a limited release
in the United States on March 7, 2008. It grossed US$
30,678 on its debut weekend, playing in two cinemas. The following week, it expanded to 22 locations and grossed $75,917 with a per-screen average of $3,451 and a total gross of $118,784. It earned another $90,403 from 36 locations in its third week with a per-screen average of $2,511 and a cumulative gross of $241,672. The film ended its theatrical run with a total domestic gross of $486,767 and a foreign gross of $3,994,693, giving a worldwide total of $4,481,460. It placed 259th for the highest-grossing films of 2008 and 87th for the year's R-rated films.
and How to Rob a Bank
which precede the film.
website Rotten Tomatoes
reported that 76% of 107 collected reviews for the film were positive, with an average
score of 6.9/10. At Metacritic
, which assigns a normalized
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 83 based on 27 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".
Manohla Dargis
of The New York Times
described Paranoid Park as "a haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy" and as "a modestly scaled triumph without a false or wasted moment". She praised Van Sant's direction, the cinematography and the overall realism of the film. The Los Angeles Times
Carina Chocano summarized the film as "a gorgeously stark, mesmerizingly elliptical story". She commended in particular the "dreamy camera work" and the "charged, simple direction". J. Hoberman
wrote for The Village Voice
that "Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor [as Van Sant]." He concluded his review saying, "Paranoid Park is wonderfully lucid: It makes confusion something tangible and heartbreak the most natural thing in life." Todd McCarthy of Variety
magazine wrote that "Through immaculate use of picture, sound and time, the director adds another panel to his series of pictures about disaffected, disconnected youth." He praised the "lovely" cinematography and the credibility of the female characters, though he felt that the soundtrack was sometimes distracting. Writing for New York
magazine, David Edelstein
opined that the film was "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". He felt that Paranoid Park was different from Van Sant's previous "experimental" films in that "it works", though he criticized Nevins' "clinically inexpressive" acting. Rolling Stone
s Peter Travers
awarded the film 3.5 out of 4 stars and commented that the combination of the soundtrack with the "visual miracles" of the cinematography, "a defiant slap at slick Hollywood formula, is mesmerizing". In a review for The Hollywood Reporter
, Kirk Honeycutt named the film "one of [Van Sant's] best movies yet".
Alternatively, William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
graded the film as a C+
and described it as "a movie about its teen hero's inability to express his feelings: to himself, to his parents, to his friends and, unfortunately, to the audience". He criticized the "amateurish" cinematography, the "half-hearted attempts at mystery" and the "wooden" cast. Salon.com
's Andrew O'Hehir wrote that Paranoid Parks "highly aestheticized and stylized depictions of teenage life sometimes seem as if they were shot through the wrong end of a telescope". He felt that the dialogue was "repetitious" and that teenage existence as portrayed in the film was less realistic than most Hollywood clichés. New York Press
critic Armond White wrote that, in the film, "Van Sant reaches out to teen subculture, only to embalm its dissatisfaction in artiness" and found it to be "full of art-movie clichés". David Edwards, writing for The Daily Mirror
, called the film "Dreary with a capital D" and "slow, melancholic, but mostly just plain weird".
and the Piaget Producers Award (Neil Kopp
, also for Old Joy), winning the latter. After its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, the film won the festival's special 60th anniversary
prize and was nominated for the prestigious Palme d'Or
. The film won two awards from the Boston Society of Film Critics
for Best Director
(Gus Van Sant, also for Milk
) and Best Cinematography (Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li). It was nominated for but did not win the Bodil Award for Best American Film awarded by the Danish Film Critics Association.
collections while working, and would use the songs they heard which they thought worked well. The film's soundscape
s—described by Sam Adams of the Los Angeles Times
as "a wash of foreign noise"—were mostly made by musician Ethan Rose and described by Van Sant as "very complicated". LA Weekly
s Randall Roberts praised the soundtrack highly, writing, "It doesn't happen too often that a film's music will tweak my visual and sonic filter to such an extent that I actually perceive a whole class of people [skateboarders] in a new light, with more depth or empathy or whatever." The soundtrack was first released in France in October 2007, and in the United States in March 2008 to coincide with the film's release.
Drama film
A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...
written and directed by Gus Van Sant
Gus Van Sant
Gus Green Van Sant, Jr. is an American director, screenwriter, painter, photographer, musician, and author. He is a two time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Director for his 1997 film Good Will Hunting and his 2008 film Milk, both of which were also nominated for Best Picture, and won the...
. The film is based on the novel of the same name
Paranoid Park (novel)
Paranoid Park is a young adult novel by Blake Nelson. Paranoid Park is the story of a 16-year-old skateboarder who tries to fit in with the skater crowd and accidentally kills a security guard while trying to board a train. The author has said that the book is a kind of retelling of Crime and...
by Blake Nelson
Blake Nelson
Blake Nelson is an American author of adult and children's literature. He grew up in Portland, Oregon, and attended Wesleyan University.Nelson began his career writing short humor pieces for Details magazine in the mid-nineties...
and takes place in Portland
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
, Oregon
Oregon
Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...
. It stars Gabe Nevins
Gabe Nevins
Gabriel "Gabe" Nevins is a professional actor who landed the star role in Gus Van Sant’s 2007 film Paranoid Park. The film premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as one of the 22 films in the competition, and won the extra-special 60th anniversary prize.In 2006, the Milwaukie, Oregon, native...
as a teenage skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard.
Van Sant wrote the draft script in two days after reading and deciding to adapt Nelson's novel. To cast the film's youths, Van Sant posted an opening casting call on social networking website MySpace
MySpace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
inviting teenagers to audition for speaking roles, as well as experienced skateboarders to act as extras
Extra (actor)
A background actor or extra is a performer in a film, television show, stage, musical, opera or ballet production, who appears in a nonspeaking, nonsinging or nondancing capacity, usually in the background...
. Filming began in October 2006 and took place at various locations in and around Portland. Scenes at the fictional Eastside Skatepark were filmed at Burnside Skatepark
Burnside Skatepark
thumb|Burnside SkateparkBurnside Skatepark is a skatepark located in Portland, Oregon, United States. Located under the east end of the Burnside Bridge, the skatepark was originally built by the skating community without permission and eventually the city approved the area as a public skatepark.The...
which was, like Eastside, built illegally by skateboarders.
Paranoid Park premiered on May 21, at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival
2007 Cannes Film Festival
The 2007 Cannes Film Festival, the sixtieth, ran from 16 to 27 May 2007. Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights opened the festival, and Denys Arcand's The Age of Ignorance closed...
and was given a limited release
Limited release
Limited release is a term in the American motion picture industry for a motion picture that is playing in a select few theaters across the country ....
on March 7, 2008. It grossed over US$
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
4,481,000 from its $3 million budget. The film received mostly positive reviews; some praised the direction and cinematography in particular, though others believed the film to be overly stylized and slow paced. It won one Independent Spirit Award, two Boston Society of Film Critics
Boston Society of Film Critics
The Boston Society of Film Critics is an organization of film reviewers from Boston, Massachusetts, United States, based publications.The BSFC was formed in 1981 to make "Boston's unique critical perspective heard on a national and international level by awarding commendations to the best of the...
awards and the Cannes Film Festival's special 60th anniversary
2007 Cannes Film Festival
The 2007 Cannes Film Festival, the sixtieth, ran from 16 to 27 May 2007. Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights opened the festival, and Denys Arcand's The Age of Ignorance closed...
prize.
Plot
Alex (Gabe NevinsGabe Nevins
Gabriel "Gabe" Nevins is a professional actor who landed the star role in Gus Van Sant’s 2007 film Paranoid Park. The film premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as one of the 22 films in the competition, and won the extra-special 60th anniversary prize.In 2006, the Milwaukie, Oregon, native...
), a 16-year-old skateboarder, rides a freight train clandestinely with a man named Scratch (Scott Patrick Green
Scott Patrick Green
Scott Patrick Green is an actor. He is often cast in Gus Van Sant's movies.He appeared in Feast of Love , Paranoid Park , Last Days , Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and My Own Private Idaho and various music videos.Scott is also a still photographer...
) whom he has just met at the Eastside Skatepark, known as "Paranoid Park". While the train is moving a security guard (John Burrowes) notices the pair, chases after them, and tries to get them off by hitting Scratch with his flashlight. During the melee, Alex hits him with his skateboard and the guard, losing balance, falls onto another track into the path of an oncoming freight train which cuts him in half. Alex tries to destroy some of the evidence. For example, he throws his skateboard into the Willamette River
Willamette River
The Willamette River is a major tributary of the Columbia River, accounting for 12 to 15 percent of the Columbia's flow. The Willamette's main stem is long, lying entirely in northwestern Oregon in the United States...
from the Steel Bridge
Steel Bridge
The Steel Bridge is a through truss, double lift bridge across the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, United States. Its lower deck carries railroad and bicycle/pedestrian traffic, while the upper deck carries road traffic and light rail , making the bridge one of the most multimodal in the world...
, and when he arrives at his friend Jared's (Jake Miller) house, he showers and disposes of the clothes he had been wearing.
Alex is later questioned at school by Detective Richard Lu (Daniel Liu), as are several other students who had been skateboarding on the night in question. It is revealed that the police have recovered Alex's skateboard, though they have not traced it back to him, and have identified DNA
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...
evidence which places the skateboard at the scene of the security guard's death.
Throughout the film Alex keeps the incident to himself, and does not confide in anyone else. After having impassive sex with his girlfriend, Jennifer (Taylor Momsen
Taylor Momsen
Taylor Michel Momsen is an American actress, musician and model who portrays the character of Jenny Humphrey on the CW television series Gossip Girl and portrayed the role of Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and fronts the rock band The Pretty Reckless.-Early life and career:Taylor...
), he breaks up with her. Another of his friends, Macy (Lauren McKinney), notices that he is worried about something. She advises him to write down whatever is bothering him as a cathartic
Catharsis
Catharsis or katharsis is a Greek word meaning "cleansing" or "purging". It is derived from the verb καθαίρειν, kathairein, "to purify, purge," and it is related to the adjective καθαρός, katharos, "pure or clean."-Dramatic uses:...
release if nothing else. He initially rejects the idea, but eventually writes an account around which the story and its narration are based. After completing the written account, Alex burns it.
Cast
- Gabe NevinsGabe NevinsGabriel "Gabe" Nevins is a professional actor who landed the star role in Gus Van Sant’s 2007 film Paranoid Park. The film premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as one of the 22 films in the competition, and won the extra-special 60th anniversary prize.In 2006, the Milwaukie, Oregon, native...
as Alex - Daniel Liu as Detective Richard Lu
- Jake Miller as Jared
- Taylor MomsenTaylor MomsenTaylor Michel Momsen is an American actress, musician and model who portrays the character of Jenny Humphrey on the CW television series Gossip Girl and portrayed the role of Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and fronts the rock band The Pretty Reckless.-Early life and career:Taylor...
as Jennifer - Lauren McKinney as Macy
- Scott Patrick GreenScott Patrick GreenScott Patrick Green is an actor. He is often cast in Gus Van Sant's movies.He appeared in Feast of Love , Paranoid Park , Last Days , Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and My Own Private Idaho and various music videos.Scott is also a still photographer...
as Scratch - John Burrowes as Security Guard
Production
Gus Van Sant chose to adaptFilm adaptation
Film adaptation is the transfer of a written work to a feature film. It is a type of derivative work.A common form of film adaptation is the use of a novel as the basis of a feature film, but film adaptation includes the use of non-fiction , autobiography, comic book, scripture, plays, and even...
American author Blake Nelson
Blake Nelson
Blake Nelson is an American author of adult and children's literature. He grew up in Portland, Oregon, and attended Wesleyan University.Nelson began his career writing short humor pieces for Details magazine in the mid-nineties...
's novel Paranoid Park
Paranoid Park (novel)
Paranoid Park is a young adult novel by Blake Nelson. Paranoid Park is the story of a 16-year-old skateboarder who tries to fit in with the skater crowd and accidentally kills a security guard while trying to board a train. The author has said that the book is a kind of retelling of Crime and...
into a film of the same name because it was set in his hometown of Portland
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
, Oregon
Oregon
Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...
, because he was an amateur skateboarder himself and because he found the story particularly interesting. At the time that he first read the novel, he was accumulating the finances for another film, but abandoned the project and decided instead to write a screenplay based on Nelson's story. His first draft of the script was written in two days, and the final draft was just 33 pages long.
Similar to his 2003 film Elephant, Van Sant sought non-professional young actors to play the main roles, and so created a page for the film on social networking site MySpace
MySpace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
. On the page, he posted an open casting call for males and females aged 14–18 who were "skaters, honor roll [students], cheerleaders, punks, drama kids, musicians, artists, student council [members], athletes, award winners, class skippers, photographers, band members, leaders, followers, shy kids, class clowns". Two audition sessions were held on August 3 and August 5, 2006, as well as an additional casting call for experienced skateboarders to act as extras
Extra (actor)
A background actor or extra is a performer in a film, television show, stage, musical, opera or ballet production, who appears in a nonspeaking, nonsinging or nondancing capacity, usually in the background...
in the film; a total of 2,971 people auditioned. Gabe Nevins
Gabe Nevins
Gabriel "Gabe" Nevins is a professional actor who landed the star role in Gus Van Sant’s 2007 film Paranoid Park. The film premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as one of the 22 films in the competition, and won the extra-special 60th anniversary prize.In 2006, the Milwaukie, Oregon, native...
, having never acted before, heard about the casting call from a skateboard store and originally auditioned as an extra. Nevins was cast in the lead role, which he says was based on his innocence that Van Sant believed trained actors to be lacking. Jake Miller, originally from Boise, Idaho
Boise, Idaho
Boise is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Idaho, as well as the county seat of Ada County. Located on the Boise River, it anchors the Boise City-Nampa metropolitan area and is the largest city between Salt Lake City, Utah and Portland, Oregon.As of the 2010 Census Bureau,...
, was on a road trip
Road trip
A road trip is any journey taken on roads, regardless of stops en route. Typically, road trips are long distances traveled by automobile.-Pre-automobile road trips:...
in Portland when he heard about the casting call and decided to audition with his friends. Taylor Momsen
Taylor Momsen
Taylor Michel Momsen is an American actress, musician and model who portrays the character of Jenny Humphrey on the CW television series Gossip Girl and portrayed the role of Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and fronts the rock band The Pretty Reckless.-Early life and career:Taylor...
was a professional actor beforehand and received the Paranoid Park script through her agent. She won the role after sending her taped audition to Van Sant. The film features two cameo appearance
Cameo appearance
A cameo role or cameo appearance is a brief appearance of a known person in a work of the performing arts, such as plays, films, video games and television...
s: Alex's father is played by professional skateboarder Jay "Smay" Williamson, and his uncle is played by the film's cinematographer Christopher Doyle
Christopher Doyle
Christopher Doyle is a cinematographer. He has won the AFI Award for cinematography, the Cannes Technical Grand Prize, Golden Osella, the Golden Horse awards , and Hong Kong Film Award . Doyle is an affiliate of the Hong Kong Society of Cinematographers.-Biography:Doyle was born in Sydney,...
. Most of the actors wore their own clothes and wrote some of their characters' dialogue to maintain a sense of authenticity.
Principal photography
thumb|300px|Film production on location in [[Newark, New Jersey]].Principal photography is the phase of film production in which the movie is filmed, with actors on set and cameras rolling, as distinct from pre-production and post-production....
began in Oregon in October 2006. Filming locations included Portland State University
Portland State University
Portland State University is a public state urban university located in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1946, it has the largest overall enrollment of any university in the state of Oregon, including undergraduate and graduate students. It is also the only public university in...
, the Steel Bridge
Steel Bridge
The Steel Bridge is a through truss, double lift bridge across the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, United States. Its lower deck carries railroad and bicycle/pedestrian traffic, while the upper deck carries road traffic and light rail , making the bridge one of the most multimodal in the world...
, St. Johns Bridge
St. Johns Bridge
The St. Johns Bridge is a steel suspension bridge that spans the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, USA, between the St. Johns neighborhood and the northwest industrial area around Linnton. It is the only suspension bridge in the Willamette Valley and one of three public highway suspension...
, Lloyd Center
Lloyd Center
Lloyd Center is a shopping mall in the Lloyd District of Portland, Oregon, United States, just northeast of downtown. It is owned by Glimcher Realty Trust and anchored by Macy's, Nordstrom, Sears, Marshalls and Ross. The mall features three floors of shopping with the third level serving mostly...
, Madison High School
Madison High School (Portland, Oregon)
For other schools of the same name, see Madison High School.James Madison High School, known as Madison High School, is a public high school in Portland, Oregon, United States. It was founded in 1957 and named after James Madison, the fourth US President and coauthor of the Constitution. In 2005,...
and Van Sant's own beach house. Scenes at the fictional Eastside Skatepark were filmed at Portland's Burnside Skatepark
Burnside Skatepark
thumb|Burnside SkateparkBurnside Skatepark is a skatepark located in Portland, Oregon, United States. Located under the east end of the Burnside Bridge, the skatepark was originally built by the skating community without permission and eventually the city approved the area as a public skatepark.The...
, which was, like Eastside, built illegally by skateboarders and subsequently approved by the city as a public skatepark. Van Sant said that his request to film at Burnside was treated with some suspicion by the park's users, as "What none of them wanted was for us to portray a corny image of the park." Cinematographer Christopher Doyle
Christopher Doyle
Christopher Doyle is a cinematographer. He has won the AFI Award for cinematography, the Cannes Technical Grand Prize, Golden Osella, the Golden Horse awards , and Hong Kong Film Award . Doyle is an affiliate of the Hong Kong Society of Cinematographers.-Biography:Doyle was born in Sydney,...
shot parts of the film with a wide-angle lens
Wide-angle lens
From a design perspective, a wide angle lens is one that projects a substantially larger image circle than would be typical for a standard design lens of the same focal length; this enables either large tilt & shift movements with a view camera, or lenses with wide fields of view.More informally,...
that is used to shoot skate videos. The film's skateboarding sequences were shot on Super 8 mm film
Super 8 mm film
Super 8 mm film is a motion picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak as an improvement of the older "Double" or "Regular" 8 mm home movie format....
, a medium commonly used in skate videos, and the remainder of the film was shot on 35 mm film
35 mm film
35 mm film is the film gauge most commonly used for chemical still photography and motion pictures. The name of the gauge refers to the width of the photographic film, which consists of strips 35 millimeters in width...
, Van Sant's medium of choice.
Theatrical release
The world premiere of Paranoid Park was held on May 21, at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival2007 Cannes Film Festival
The 2007 Cannes Film Festival, the sixtieth, ran from 16 to 27 May 2007. Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights opened the festival, and Denys Arcand's The Age of Ignorance closed...
. The film was subsequently screened at the Auckland International Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival
Edinburgh International Film Festival
The Edinburgh International Film Festival is an annual fortnight of cinema screenings and related events taking place each June. Established in 1947, it is the world's oldest continually running film festival...
, Toronto International Film Festival
Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival is a publicly-attended film festival held each September in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2010, 339 films from 59 countries were screened at 32 screens in downtown Toronto venues...
, Athens Film Festival, Raindance Film Festival
Raindance Film Festival
Raindance is an independent film festival and film school that operates from various cities including: London, New York, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Budapest, Berlin and Brussels...
, New York Film Festival
New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival has been a major film festival since it began in 1963 in New York. The films are selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center...
, Vienna International Film Festival and the Oslo Films from the South Festival before its theatrical release. Its international tour of the festival circuit continued after its U.S. release, and it was screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Portland International Film Festival, London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival takes place every spring in London, England. It began as a season of gay and lesbian films at the National Film Theatre in 1986 and 1987 under the title "Gay's Own Pictures", curated by Peter Packer of the Tyneside Cinema, and was renamed the London...
, Transilvania International Film Festival
Transilvania International Film Festival
The Transilvania International Film Festival is a film festival held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania and established in 2001 by Romanian Film Promotion...
, Midnight Sun Film Festival
Midnight Sun Film Festival
Midnight Sun Film Festival is an annual five-day film festival in Sodankylä, Finland. The festival usually takes place in the second week of June. One of the main themes of the festival is to show films without a break all day and night long, while the sun keeps on shining.The Midnight Sun Film...
and the Cinepur Choice Film Festival.
Paranoid Park was given a limited release
Limited release
Limited release is a term in the American motion picture industry for a motion picture that is playing in a select few theaters across the country ....
in the United States on March 7, 2008. It grossed US$
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
30,678 on its debut weekend, playing in two cinemas. The following week, it expanded to 22 locations and grossed $75,917 with a per-screen average of $3,451 and a total gross of $118,784. It earned another $90,403 from 36 locations in its third week with a per-screen average of $2,511 and a cumulative gross of $241,672. The film ended its theatrical run with a total domestic gross of $486,767 and a foreign gross of $3,994,693, giving a worldwide total of $4,481,460. It placed 259th for the highest-grossing films of 2008 and 87th for the year's R-rated films.
Home media
Paranoid Park was released on DVD in Canada on July 22, 2008, and in the United States on October 7, 2008. The disc includes trailers for The Last WinterThe Last Winter
The Last Winter is a 2006 thriller film, directed by Larry Fessenden. The Last Winter premiered in The Contemporary World Cinema Programme at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2006...
and How to Rob a Bank
How to Rob a Bank
How to Rob a Bank is an American independent film, with as its subtitle: And 10 Tips To Actually Get Away With It. It finished filming in March 2006 and premiered May 20, 2007 at the Cannes Film Market. It was shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 25, 2007. It opened in limited release in...
which precede the film.
Critical reception
Paranoid Park received mostly favorable reviews from critics. Review aggregatorReview aggregator
A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services . This system stores the reviews and then uses them for purposes such as: creating a website for users to view the reviews, selling information to third parties about consumer tendencies and creating databases for...
website Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
reported that 76% of 107 collected reviews for the film were positive, with an average
Weighted mean
The weighted mean is similar to an arithmetic mean , where instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others...
score of 6.9/10. At Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
, which assigns a normalized
Standard score
In statistics, a standard score indicates how many standard deviations an observation or datum is above or below the mean. It is a dimensionless quantity derived by subtracting the population mean from an individual raw score and then dividing the difference by the population standard deviation...
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 83 based on 27 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".
Manohla Dargis
Manohla Dargis
Manohla Dargis is a chief film critic for The New York Times, along with A.O. Scott. She was formerly a chief film critic for the Los Angeles Times, the film editor at the LA Weekly, and a film critic at The Village Voice. She has written for a variety of publications, including Film Comment and...
of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
described Paranoid Park as "a haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy" and as "a modestly scaled triumph without a false or wasted moment". She praised Van Sant's direction, the cinematography and the overall realism of the film. The Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
Carina Chocano summarized the film as "a gorgeously stark, mesmerizingly elliptical story". She commended in particular the "dreamy camera work" and the "charged, simple direction". J. Hoberman
J. Hoberman
James Lewis Hoberman , also known as J. Hoberman, is an American film critic. He is currently the senior film critic for The Village Voice, a post he has held since 1988.-Education:...
wrote for The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
that "Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor [as Van Sant]." He concluded his review saying, "Paranoid Park is wonderfully lucid: It makes confusion something tangible and heartbreak the most natural thing in life." Todd McCarthy of Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
magazine wrote that "Through immaculate use of picture, sound and time, the director adds another panel to his series of pictures about disaffected, disconnected youth." He praised the "lovely" cinematography and the credibility of the female characters, though he felt that the soundtrack was sometimes distracting. Writing for New York
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
magazine, David Edelstein
David Edelstein
David Edelstein is the chief film critic for New York Magazine, as well as the film critic for NPR's Fresh Air and CBS Sunday Morning. He lives in Brooklyn, New York....
opined that the film was "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". He felt that Paranoid Park was different from Van Sant's previous "experimental" films in that "it works", though he criticized Nevins' "clinically inexpressive" acting. Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
s Peter Travers
Peter Travers
Peter Travers is an American film critic, who has written for, in turn, People and Rolling Stone. Travers also hosts a celebrity interview show called Popcorn on ABC News Now and ABCNews.com.-Career:...
awarded the film 3.5 out of 4 stars and commented that the combination of the soundtrack with the "visual miracles" of the cinematography, "a defiant slap at slick Hollywood formula, is mesmerizing". In a review for The Hollywood Reporter
The Hollywood Reporter
Formerly a daily trade magazine, The Hollywood Reporter re-launched in late 2010 as a unique hybrid publication serving the entertainment industry and a consumer audience...
, Kirk Honeycutt named the film "one of [Van Sant's] best movies yet".
Alternatively, William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is an online newspaper and former print newspaper covering Seattle, Washington, United States, and the surrounding metropolitan area...
graded the film as a C+
Grade (education)
Grades are standardized measurements of varying levels of comprehension within a subject area. Grades can be assigned in letters , as a range , as a number out of a possible total , as descriptors , in percentages, or, as is common in some post-secondary...
and described it as "a movie about its teen hero's inability to express his feelings: to himself, to his parents, to his friends and, unfortunately, to the audience". He criticized the "amateurish" cinematography, the "half-hearted attempts at mystery" and the "wooden" cast. Salon.com
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
's Andrew O'Hehir wrote that Paranoid Parks "highly aestheticized and stylized depictions of teenage life sometimes seem as if they were shot through the wrong end of a telescope". He felt that the dialogue was "repetitious" and that teenage existence as portrayed in the film was less realistic than most Hollywood clichés. New York Press
New York Press
New York Press was a free alternative weekly in New York City, that was published from 1988 to 2011. During its lifetime, it was the main competitor to the Village Voice...
critic Armond White wrote that, in the film, "Van Sant reaches out to teen subculture, only to embalm its dissatisfaction in artiness" and found it to be "full of art-movie clichés". David Edwards, writing for The Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror is a British national daily tabloid newspaper which was founded in 1903. Twice in its history, from 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its masthead was changed to read simply The Mirror, which is how the paper is often referred to in popular parlance. It had an...
, called the film "Dreary with a capital D" and "slow, melancholic, but mostly just plain weird".
Top ten lists
The film appeared on numerous critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008:- 3rd – J. HobermanJ. HobermanJames Lewis Hoberman , also known as J. Hoberman, is an American film critic. He is currently the senior film critic for The Village Voice, a post he has held since 1988.-Education:...
, The Village VoiceThe Village VoiceThe Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City... - 4th – V.A. Musetto, New York PostNew York PostThe New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...
- 5th – Liam Lacey, The Globe and MailThe Globe and MailThe Globe and Mail is a nationally distributed Canadian newspaper, based in Toronto and printed in six cities across the country. With a weekly readership of approximately 1 million, it is Canada's largest-circulation national newspaper and second-largest daily newspaper after the Toronto Star...
- 5th – Scott Tobias, The A.V. ClubThe A.V. ClubThe A.V. Club is an entertainment newspaper and website published by The Onion. Its features include reviews of new films, music, television, books, games and DVDs, as well as interviews and other regular offerings examining both new and classic media and other elements of pop culture. Unlike its...
- 5th – Sheri Linden, The Hollywood ReporterThe Hollywood ReporterFormerly a daily trade magazine, The Hollywood Reporter re-launched in late 2010 as a unique hybrid publication serving the entertainment industry and a consumer audience...
- 6th – Manohla DargisManohla DargisManohla Dargis is a chief film critic for The New York Times, along with A.O. Scott. She was formerly a chief film critic for the Los Angeles Times, the film editor at the LA Weekly, and a film critic at The Village Voice. She has written for a variety of publications, including Film Comment and...
, The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization... - 6th – Rene Rodriguez, The Miami HeraldThe Miami HeraldThe Miami Herald is a daily newspaper owned by The McClatchy Company headquartered on Biscayne Bay in the Omni district of Downtown Miami, Florida, United States...
- 8th – Noel Murray, The A.V. ClubThe A.V. ClubThe A.V. Club is an entertainment newspaper and website published by The Onion. Its features include reviews of new films, music, television, books, games and DVDs, as well as interviews and other regular offerings examining both new and classic media and other elements of pop culture. Unlike its...
Awards and nominations
Paranoid Park was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards for Best FeatureIndependent Spirit Award for Best Film
The Independent Spirit Award for Best Film is one of the annual Independent Spirit Awards.-1980s:* 1985: After Hours - Martin Scorsese** Blood Simple - Joel and Ethan Coen** Smooth Talk...
and the Piaget Producers Award (Neil Kopp
Neil Kopp
Neil Kopp is an American film, commercial and music video producer best known for his work on the films Old Joy and Paranoid Park ....
, also for Old Joy), winning the latter. After its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, the film won the festival's special 60th anniversary
2007 Cannes Film Festival
The 2007 Cannes Film Festival, the sixtieth, ran from 16 to 27 May 2007. Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights opened the festival, and Denys Arcand's The Age of Ignorance closed...
prize and was nominated for the prestigious Palme d'Or
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...
. The film won two awards from the Boston Society of Film Critics
Boston Society of Film Critics
The Boston Society of Film Critics is an organization of film reviewers from Boston, Massachusetts, United States, based publications.The BSFC was formed in 1981 to make "Boston's unique critical perspective heard on a national and international level by awarding commendations to the best of the...
for Best Director
Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director
- 1980s :- 1990s :- 2000s :- 2010s :- Trivia :* Most wins:** 3: Steven Spielberg...
(Gus Van Sant, also for Milk
Milk (film)
Milk is a 2008 American biographical film on the life of gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors...
) and Best Cinematography (Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li). It was nominated for but did not win the Bodil Award for Best American Film awarded by the Danish Film Critics Association.
Soundtrack
Most of the music choices came about during the editing process; Van Sant and the editors listened to each others' iTunesITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
collections while working, and would use the songs they heard which they thought worked well. The film's soundscape
Soundscape
A soundscape is a sound or combination of sounds that forms or arises from an immersive environment. The study of soundscape is the subject of acoustic ecology...
s—described by Sam Adams of the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
as "a wash of foreign noise"—were mostly made by musician Ethan Rose and described by Van Sant as "very complicated". LA Weekly
LA Weekly
LA Weekly is a free weekly tabloid-sized "alternative weekly" in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 1978 by Editor/Publisher Jay Levin and a board of directors that included actor-producer Michael Douglas...
s Randall Roberts praised the soundtrack highly, writing, "It doesn't happen too often that a film's music will tweak my visual and sonic filter to such an extent that I actually perceive a whole class of people [skateboarders] in a new light, with more depth or empathy or whatever." The soundtrack was first released in France in October 2007, and in the United States in March 2008 to coincide with the film's release.