Paranoid Park

Gus Van Sant is so good at being Gus Van Sant. He can take a relatively bland and conventional story, which this is, and make it contemplative, dark and dreamy. He revisits the milieu of Last Days or Elephant in that he takes relatively unheard of actors, or people who have never acted before, and thrusts them into his grainy, repeating-scene world. Jon and I noted that if he hadn't put his stamp on this, it would have been boring, with a capital b, but what we got was pure Van Sant -- almost too much so (enough with the young skateboard hotties taking their shirts off!) -- well lit, well shot, story well told.