that peculiar quality...

Gus Van Sant's recent Paranoid Park is an impressive example of using non-professional actors to capture the essence of childhood/naivete. Formal elements: speed ramping, longshot, steadicam, exposure fluctuation, timelapse, super8/35mm.

He also does a great job at painting this clouded, almost mystical portrait of Portland. I feel as thought it speaks to the reverence we have for our childhoods - the places we went, things we did become etchings. This isn't to say our memory isn't true to reality but rather that we colour things in, distort, edit.

"Like many of Van Sant’s films, Paranoid Park throbs with the underlying threat of violence, yet it is, undeniably, an exploration of innocence. Alex possesses that peculiar quality of childhood which distances him from his own mortality; it’s what makes him able to appreciate the scandent ascent and careening descent of the skateboard. In some ways, the film is a celebration of that freedom, and perhaps a glance back for Van Sant to his own youth, the days of his first Super-8 forays into the art form. It is also a movie about boyhood disillusionment. Even at the celebrated Paranoid Park, a sloping cement landscape appropriated from beneath a highway overpass, Alex is unable to skateboard. He tells people he isn’t good enough, but actually Alex is too burdened to be weightless."

http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/reviews/article_display.jsp