Paranoid Park starts opening this Friday, depending on how cool the city you live in is and how savvy the local arthouse theaters are, so look for some interesting press this week as critics jive its thriller plotline with their own ideas about the craze and menace of skateboarding.



First up: There's a cool interview this morning in the NY Times between Blake Nelson (author of the Paranoid Park book that came first) and director Gus Van Sant: "Back in Portland, the Latest Outsider Has a Skateboard." The whole thing is worth reading, but speaking strictly as a scholar of sk8sploitation cinema, the standout revelation of this interview is that Gus Van Sant worked on Skateboard: The Movie That Defies Gravity, the 1978 Leif Garret classic turkey (Tony Alva as Tony Bluetile!) that established the sk8sploitation genre (I don't see Van Sant listed on the IMDB.com listing, but that's not saying much).

Speaking of Gus Van Sant and sk8sploitation, I'm also giving him credit for discovering Stacy Peralta look-alike John Robinson: When I saw the Van Sant Columbinespolitation flick Elephant, my first thought was, "Damn that kid looks just like Stacy Peralta," and next thing I knew the kid was playing Peralta in Lords of Dogtown. Gus Van Sant has his finger on the pulse of sk8sploitation film like no other. I should totally be a Hollywood casting director now that this sk8sploitation thing is catching on: Have your people call my people.

Anyway... Paranoid Park looks interesting – skateboarding! murder! intrigue! Burnside!

Here's the trailer:


Absolutely unrelated: Greg Lutzka won Slaughter at the Opera. Adam Dyet took 2nd. That Ryan Decenzo am kid who's been blowing up all over the place took 3rd. As far as I know, nobody was actually slaughtered at the opera, though that would totally have made for great sk8sploitation cinema.