An incident occurred near a popular skateboarding park, known as Paranoid Park, where Alex [Gabe Nevins] and his friend, Jared [Jake Miller], were skating on the night if the incident.

Unfortunately this is one of those odd movies that I’m not sure how to summarize the plot without giving anything away. But I have to start out by saying that this movie is way too overhyped. At least for me, I’ve been hearing a lot of great reviews for it and it won the 60^th Anniversary Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.

So, as usual let’s start with what I did like. What I really enjoyed about this movie was how they really layered the story for you. If they gave this to you straight the movie would literally last half an hour, and it would be ridiculously boring. However, they give you the story in stages. The best part about it is that you will hate the movie and want to walk out for the first half hour because everything is really confusing. You’re not sure which parts to believe, or not believe. You’re not sure why anything is really happening. All you really know is that Alex likes to skateboard and there is a cool skateboarding park called Paranoid Park.

Another thing I definitely love about this movie has to be its cinematic nature. There are moments when Alex is by himself and just monologueing and giving us more of the story, and there is such great music in these scenes. The camera really becomes more noticeable in these scenes and it reminds me why I really like to watch these kinds of movies. I really am going to have to look up this soundtrack because I’m going to be jamming to some of these songs for months to come.

Even though as usual I’ve been able to find good elements, I have to say overall this movie should have been a short rather than a feature in my opinion. There are a few moments that Gus could’ve left out. The couple scenes that we see Alex with his girlfriend really aren’t needed. She adds nothing to the story mainly because she is really his life outside of skateboarding and the night at Paranoid Park. And some scenes with his friend Jared made no sense at all.

This movie has a format such that the first half hour makes little to no sense, and then the following half hour fills in a few gaps, and the last twenty minutes pads in the rest. Even though it is somewhat interesting as the director is filling in the gaps and you feel like everything is beginning to make sense it is really frustrating during the opening half hour attempting to get into the movie. And I think it adds to the problem that I saw a movie which did it 1000 times better over the weekend [Memento].

Overall I think this is really just for the indie community or if you want to see something outside of the regular Hollywood realm. Gus Van Sant did an overall good job with the film and I guess I’m just being oddly different. Definitely worth a rental.

IMDB says 7.1/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 75%

I say 7.0/10