Paranoid Park by Gus Van Sant
Alex, a sixteen-year-old skateboarder, accidentally kills a security guard near the most notorious skate park in Portland (Oregon), known as Paranoid Park. After hesitation, he decides to say nothing.
Nobody captures the world of adolescence like Gus Van Sant. Not even Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides”. Floating, without memory or future, in an amniotic present, most American teenagers resignedly wait for the unreturnable train of the American way of life to pass. Some cannot come to terms with it, which results in films like “Elephant”. Alex, however, is somewhat in between. He is deeply reflective about this fading adult world (symbolically blurred on the screen) and frequents the fringes at the skate park; but it takes this tragedy, for which he is the unwitting responsible party, to understand that he will never be like the others. For better or for worse, the unpunished yet confronted drama will prevent him from fitting into the mold. Not necessarily bad news.
A simple story, rendered with Gus Van Sant’s elliptical and fluid style, unjustly forgotten in the 2005 awards for his magnificent “Last Days” (about the final days of the Nirvana singer).
Death Proof by Quentin Tarantino
The creator of “Pulp Fiction”, winner at Cannes thirteen years ago, treats us to a “Grindhouse” film (named after the cinema chain that, in the 1960s, scheduled double features of cheap movies).
Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russel as a comic book villain) is a serial killer of a particular kind: he uses his stunt car to murder Texan bimbos in the Austin area by causing extremely brutal accidents. However, he meets his match, or rather his mistresses, in the form of a trio of daring stuntwomen who turn him into pulp in a momentous car chase. It’s funny, violent, offbeat, but ultimately, one must admit, it’s not earth-shattering. The Tarantino of “Kill Bill” seems far off!
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Julian Schnabel
The true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of Elle magazine, who becomes paralyzed following a stroke, yet finds enough resources to write a book by dictating the text by blinking his only working eye.
The first half-hour (the patient’s awakening filmed in first-person view) is unbearable. Bauby, paralyzed but lucid, gradually realizes his plight, and the audience is on the verge of physical discomfort (as was my case). What follows is more conventional, with the director filming Mathieu Amalric playing Bauby (the quintessential actor’s performance à la “Rain Man”) without always avoiding clichés and sometimes a Lelouch-style approach.
Disturbing in its first part, conventional thereafter, I am not sure if this film is to be recommended.
