{"id":113,"date":"2008-03-07T17:01:10","date_gmt":"2008-03-08T00:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=113"},"modified":"2008-03-07T17:08:58","modified_gmt":"2008-03-08T00:08:58","slug":"the-latest-from-americas-greatest-living-director","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/03\/07\/the-latest-from-americas-greatest-living-director\/","title":{"rendered":"The Latest from America’s Greatest Living Director"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

On Ramps and Off, Free-Falling Through Time <\/nyt_headline><\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

Gabe Nevins as Alex in the 2007 film “Paranoid Park,” directed by Gus Van Sant. photo by Scott Green\/IFC Films<\/em><\/p>\n

By MANOHLA DARGIS<\/a>
\nPublished: March 7, 2008<\/p>\n

Paranoid Park is a swooping skateboarding free zone where young men learn to fly. It\u2019s also the title of Gus Van Sant<\/a>\u2019s most recent film, 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\u2019s films \u201cParanoid Park\u201d<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

One of the most important and critically marginalized American filmmakers working in the commercial mainstream, Mr. Van Sant has traveled from down-and-out independent to Hollywood hire to aesthetic iconoclast, a trajectory that holds its own fascination and mysteries. The Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr has been instrumental in Mr. Van Sant\u2019s recent artistic renaissance \u2014 evident in his newfound love of hypnotically long and gliding camera moves \u2014 though his tenure in the mainstream has left its mark too, as demonstrated by his rejection of straight narrative. As in three-act, character-driven, commercially honed narrative in which boys will be boys of a certain type and girls will be girls right alongside them.<\/p>\n

The boy in \u201cParanoid Park,\u201d Alex (the newcomer Gabe Nevins), lives and skates in Portland, Ore., where one evening he is implicated in the brutal death of a security guard. In adapting the young-adult novel by Blake Nelson, Mr. Van Sant has retained much of the story \u2014 a man dies, Alex writes it all down \u2014 but has reshuffled the original\u2019s chain of events to create an elliptical narrative that continually folds back on itself. Shortly after the film opens, you see Alex writing the words Paranoid Park in a notebook, a gesture that appears to set off a flurry of seemingly disconnected visuals \u2014 boys leaping through the air in slow motion, clouds racing across the sky in fast \u2014 that piece together only later.<\/p>\n

[ click to click to view scenes from Paranoid Park<\/em><\/a> ]<\/p>\n

[ click to read rest of article in the New York Times<\/em><\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times On Ramps and Off, Free-Falling Through Time Gabe Nevins as Alex in the 2007 film “Paranoid Park,” directed by Gus Van Sant. photo by Scott Green\/IFC Films By MANOHLA DARGIS Published: March 7, 2008 Paranoid Park is a swooping skateboarding free zone where young men learn to fly. It\u2019s also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}