Jolt Country

Turns out, he had one more in him. Paranoid Park is the fourth leg of what turned into Gus Van Sant's "Death Tetralogy".

It is both the least of the four films, and the easiest one to recommend, because unlike the others, you know, some things happen and people say things in this one. Aardvark can't turn the sound down on this one. That's often to its detriment, because Van Sant's inclination to hire unknowns is all well and good, as in "Elephant", when you just need them to be natural and just do whatever they do until they get killed, but here they are asked to deliver lines and do narration, the results of which are more uneven.

Where the other films explored the deaths of the people we're watching, this one is concerned with the results of one of our characters accidentally killing someone else. Our hero here is "Alex", a skateboarder who gets up the gumption to head down to "Paranoid Park", a seedy, underground (figuratively and almost literally) skate park which echoes something out of Mad Max -- there is a different society down there, and to enter that particular Thunderdome requires you have the skills, and apparently the correct skateboard, to hang with this seedy crew.

Anyway, things go south, a security guard gets cut in half by a train, and the movie uses what I now realize (after a weekend of watching his movies) is Van Sant's favorite technique, playing fast and loose with the timeline and showing things before, and after, and during, and from different perspectives, and all that jazz.

It's the easiest to recommend, but easiest of all to recommend to Flack, just 'cuz there's some really nice skateboarding footage in there, I thought. Plus I'm guessing Flack accidentally killed a guy or two down in the skate park in his day.

Nobody's judging here.

Here is my final ranking of the Gus Van Sant death movies, three out of four of which I just saw this weekend, thanks to Flack (who may or may not have killed people down at the skate park):

1. Gerry
2. Last Days
3. Elephant
4. Paranoid Park

I googled "Gus Van Sant movies ranked", and the first one I clicked on had Good Will Hunting at like #9, but Gerry at #1, which shocked the hell out of me. Maybe there's more of me out there.

Fear us.

Sorry it took me so long to respond to this. I was down at the skate park murd-- er, skateboarding.

My friends and I enjoyed skateboarding, but we weren't skaters. We didn't have the clothes, the look, or the attitude. In my high school there was a group of kids that fit that mold. They were a couple of years older than me and terrifying. Their look was a weird conglomeration of metal, punk, and skater. One of them was a short stocky guy who would show off his switchblade any time you asked, and sometimes when you didn't. One was a chubby kid named McKinney, who everyone started calling McSkinny the summer after he discovered speed and lost a bunch if weight. There was a guy with a white spot in his hair named Skunk, and a guy with pointy ears they called Spock. There were two brothers with long hair who wore Motorhead shirts and bullet belts and told everyone about all the places they had broken into, until the day they were pulled out of school and arrested for breaking into a place.

They actually invited me to go skating with them once. We went to downtown Oklahoma City and skated the Skirvin Plaza parking garage, a six-story monstrosity that had a spiral that led from the top to the bottom. It was one of the most exciting and scary things I had ever done on a skateboard. When we got to the ground level there was a vending machine, which one of the guys approached and, for no particular reason, smashed the front in using his skateboard. I was old enough to understand the concept of guilt by association, and all of us scattered in different directions. I don't remember seeing anyone chasing us but I skated as if the entire military was nipping at my heels.

Nobody ever talked about it and they never invited me to go skating with them again. To be honest, I had forgotten all about those guys... until watching this film. Suddenly I was whisked back to that time, a time when kids just a few years older than you seem a lot older than you. When you're 14, kids who are two years older than you can drive, and get jobs. When you're 16, kids two years older than you may be out of school and can buy cigarettes.

It was an age of confusion, of saying nothing when you can't think of the right thing, or sometimes anything. It's a time when you can influence, or be influenced. A time when we're surrounded by people and yet can feel so very alone. It's an age where making one wrong choice at the wrong time can change your entire life. Gus Van Sant is an absolute master of taking those moments and translating them to film. Absolute master.

PS: Anyone who watched as many skate videos as I did would immediately recognize "Paranoid Park" as Burnside Skate Park, a park in Portland that, as in the movie, was illegally built by skaters. I had a poster on my wall of a guy grinding the coping at Burnside, and used to dream of visiting it someday. I never made it there, but Burnside is one of the playable levels in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.