Sitdown, standup: what moves a man to act? For Gus Van Sant's latest hero, the answer is nothing not even murder

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PARANOID PARK

DIRECTED BY Gus Van Sant

STARRING Gabe Nevins and Taylor Momsen

IFC FIRST TAKE

CHICAGO 10

DIRECTED BY Brett Morgen

STARRING HankAzaria and Mark Ruffalo

ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS

WHEN DIRECTOR GUS VAN SANT wanted to cast his new film, Paranoid Park, with a group of high school--age unknowns, he relied on a method sure to rattle any casting director: a MySpace page. It represented, he said, an attempt to find natural nonprofessional actors--an irony, since the novices of MySpace are already old pros at posing for a camera. Social networking sites are built on canny self-expression, their participants acting as talent, photographers, and publicists all rolled into one. Might a movie role be superfluous when a star is born with every mouse click?

An even bigger irony might be that Alex (Gabe Nevins), the protagonist of Paranoid Park, would have no idea what to do with a MySpace page. Self-expression is a concept foreign to him; when his classmates debate the war in Iraq or his girlfriend demands to know his innermost thoughts, Alex can muster nothing in response. Only skateboarding seems to hold an interest for the boy, but even at that he's timid and barely average. When Alex sets the plot in motion by accidentally killing a security guard, he is understandably shocked. It's not just that he's caused a death--he's startled that something he's done has had any impact at all.

At first Paranoid Park channels so many of Van Sant's favorite themes that it starts to resemble a greatest hits package. Nevins is a ruby-lipped waif in the mold of River Phoenix, and Van Sant follows him around school in tracking shots that are ripped straight from Elephant and scored to Elliott Smith songs he's poached from Good Will Hunting. That this skater boy's sexuality turns out to be ambiguous is a given in this milieu.

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Still, what initially seems to be minor Van Sant is just Van Sant played in a minor key. While most directors would overwhelm this simple story with metaphorical import (or tart it up a la the salacious Larry Clark), Van Sant keeps things in check, allowing unexpected grace notes to seep through the margins. You may wonder, restless, whether the movie is an allegory in the vein of Elephant and Last Days, and if so, of what? To that, Paranoid Park takes its cues from its hero; it offers nothing but an enigmatic smile, leaving the rest up to you.

Though Alex may have no interest in asserting himself, the men of Chicago 10 are an entirely different story. Directed by Brett Morgen and animated in the rotoscoped style of Waking Life, this heavily re-created documentary tells the story of Abbie Hoffman (voiced by Hank Azaria) and his fellow counterculture revolutionaries as they go on trial following riots outside the 1968 Democratic convention. Loud and brash, the men were unafraid to ruffle feathers in their attempts to protest the Vietnam War, even if it put them at odds with their more peaceful brethren, including gay writer Allen Ginsberg (who was summoned to court to read an erotic poem and then attempted to lead a chant-filled meditation--one of many strange but true anecdotes dramatized in the film).

It's potent material, and kudos to Morgen for attempting to tell it in a dynamic way, but the characters' fervor can't be matched by the oddly constrained animation style. When Abbie Hoffman yells, flirts, or laughs, his mouth hangs open like a slack Halloween mask, and the rest of his gang (who called themselves the "yippies") don't fare much better. These men weren't afraid to look and act cartoonish to get their point across, but to actually see them as cartoons robs them of their real world jolt. Morgan attempts to juice things up with flashy camera moves and loud, anachronistic music from Rage Against the Machine and Eminem, but the true story is so wild, it doesn't need to be enhanced. The tale may get another shot, though. Steven Spielberg is casting his own version with Borat's Sacha Baron Cohen as Hoffman and stars like Kevin Spacey, Will Smith, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in contention to play the rest of the rabble-rousers. Great cast--did he find them on Facebook?

COPYRIGHT 2008 LPI Media
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning