editorlisa

Manohla Dargis’ amazing review of PARANOID PARK in today’s New York Times.  Can’t decide which quote is my favorite:

Like most of Mr. Van Sant’s films PARANOID PARK 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.

PARANOID PARK looks like a dream… but the story is truer than most kitchen-sink dramas. This isn’t the canned realism of the tidy psychological exegesis; this is realism that accepts the mystery and ambiguity of human existence.

Mr. Van Sant has always made a home for lost boys, from River Phoenix’s wanderer in MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO to the ghostly Kurt Cobain figure who roams through LAST DAYS, those downy, itinerant beauties whose words stick to their tongues and whose pain seems as bottomless as their eyes. In some respects Paranoid Park represents adulthood; the critic Amy Taubin has provocatively suggested to Mr. Van Sant that the film’s subtext is that of a gay initiation. (He didn’t disagree.) Both readings are ripe for the picking. But what strikes me the hardest about “Paranoid Park” is the intimacy, the love — carnal, paternal, human — of Mr. Van Sant’s expansive, embracing vision.