Elephant, 2003

When people ask me "What's the worst movie you've--" I say "Elephant" before they can finish their sentence. I've enjoyed Gus Van Sant's work. Sometimes I thought he was a bit hit or miss. But I never thought he could make a film so masturbatory that it's boring to almost everyone else. I really thought this film would be enjoyable. When one mentions "school shooting", many things come to mind. The emotions of other students, the regret some students might feel about contributing to the shooters' social isolation, the emotions of parents, fear, a build up of some sort. Actually, thinking up all of these things is about as good as it's going to get. Much better than this film. Anyone who says this film was "hypnotic" or "dreamy" was trying their hardest to not come off as the philistines they truly are. The shots in this film are usually set up behind some pseudo-hipster with no character. Their names are given to us before we watch them walk around for a good ten or fifteen minutes and the only thoughts provoked are "When is this going to end?" The splitting up of time line was pretentious and with no purpose. It's as if it was done only to say "Hey, look at this mildly intriguing thing I can do with filmmaking!" Nothing relevant ties itself to another event. Except for the shooting at the end. The film is called Elephant. In one scene, there's a picture of an elephant on the future-school-shooters wall of his bedroom. That is the only connection the title of the movie has with the actually movie. Interpret that however you'd like. By the end of this movie, you really want your time back. Or to shoot a bunch of people involved with the making of this film and the yourself.

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Be prepared to watch the backs of people's heads, that's all I have to say. 90% of this movie could be cut if you didn't have to watch a student walk across the high school grounds. This movie is filled with many tedious scenes, I fast forwarded through most of it. The acting was sub-par, and the characters were stereotypical. This was also an odd high school..no control over the students whatsoever..most of them didn't appear to be in any actual classes, just wandering around from place to place doing whatever they wanted, or atleast that's the impression I got. The relationship between the killers was odd and unnecessary to the story.

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A marvel of a film. I won't get into what it 'says' about whatever it is talking about; with this film, you should decide. But I will tell you, it is amazingly made. Long silences that are NOT boring, but telling. True-to-life dialogue and acting. A timeline that is impressivly out of order, but for good (and profound) reasons. One of the ten best films of the decade, and incredibly underrated. Time os gonna tell on this one. Your kids will watch this in their college classes, twenty years from now.

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