Amoeba Music

Milk is the true story of gay-rights activist Harvey Milk who was the first openly homosexual man elected to public office.

Dustin Lance Black won the Academy Award for his screenplay, which is tense with information, but never loses sight of its human content. The story has a dynamic structure and has many scenes that pack an emotional punch.

Gus Van Sant is nominated for Best Director at this year's Academy Awards for his moving bio-pic Milk, but that wasn't the only film Van Sant directed this year. Last March his indie film Paranoid Park opened around the country in a limited release. The film flew under the radar when it was in theaters and it was later overshadowed by the big budget Milk, but Paranoid Park is a beautiful film that deserves its time in the spotlight. The film is another one of Van Sant's dreamy, meditative character studies similar to his two previous films Last Days and Elephant. Visually the film has a slow entrancing rhythm that is accentuated by an eclectic, beautiful score. The cast is mainly non-professional actors that Van Sant found on the internet, and their performances bring a delicate honesty to the story.

The film is about a young teen named Alex who wants to hangout at the local skate park but, in doing so, he experiences a life altering accident. As the film progresses we see Alex internally struggling with this enormous secret he has, a secret that soon isolates and estranges him from almost everyone he knows. Van Sant is less interested in moving the plot along than he is in observing and capturing his characters' state of mind. In Paranoid Park Van Sant captures that middle school state of mind like no other director has, as the film unfolds we slowly start to realize that Alex is carrying that burden of knowledge that so many adolescents learn in their mid teens:  that life can be overwhelmingly difficult and often unfair. My favorite scene in the film is when Alex meets a good friend for coffee and, in their conversation, his friend just might provide him with a solution of how to lift the burden that is weighing so heavily on his conscious. Invest time in this film and let it cast its quiet spell on you.