Elephant

russman3.0

Synchronized puking should be an Olympic sport

🎃 Night of the Living Brady 🎃🧛🏻🩸🦇5.0

Don't let the title fool you. The movie doesn't have elephant in it, but it has a deep meaning to it that will make your feel like mash after thinking about it to long. The story is about high school violence that unfolds on an ordinary school day, inside an American high school, filled with schoolwork, football, gossip and socializing. For each of the students we meet, high school is a different experience: stimulating, friendly, traumatic, lonely, hard.'Elephant' is loosely based on the school shooting in 1999 known as "Columbine High School Massacre", with the shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. When I say loosely I really do mean loosely, because this isn't base on a true story bullsh't that you always get in movies; it's actually Gus Van Sant way to make a movie relating to the biggest school massacre of all time and showing loneliness and depression due to bullying, and the big things around them which would later end violently.Now this movie isn't for anyone and those's who are expecting a normal film structure with three acts, well you are not going to get that. The ending without giving anything away, ended in a way that I feel loads of people are saying to themselves "What the hell, what was that about? What the hell did I just watch and why did it end like that?" I won't lie but I took me time to think over the ending and after doing some research I think I got it, but if I have to explain it to you means spoiling it for you and I like people going into movies with only knowing the story and that's it.Gus Van Sant directed this movie in a way that it has a depressing and lonely feel to it. The directing in this movie was really excellent and my second favorite movie from him.The long takes and the fact that this movie is set in one day I thought it was brilliant and a smart move to do. To be honest I didn't notice this until late on in the movie.For problems, I don't have any. The acting was all good, the directing as I said before was filmed top notch and the fact that movie leaves you hanging cold cold.

Mike D'Angelo

0/100My hatred for this film randomly came up in the comments of a documentary about Pope Francis, and rather than address it there I'll just add the review I wrote (for Time Out New York) here. Though I apparently didn't get much space for it, so it doesn't really capture my loathing very well. A bit more helpful is something I posted from Cannes to a cinephile chat group (before anyone who wasn't at the fest had seen the film, obviously), which I'll also append below.IMPORTANT: I engaged in numerous arguments about this film in 2003 and have heard the case for the defense from the best and brightest. No desire to relitigate it in the comments here. I'm putting this up just to satisfy folks' curiosity about why I hate it so much. (Watched it a second time—before writing the review, after all the nerd debates—and despised it even more.) The key thing to understand is that it's the structure to which I fundamentally object: the way that Van Sant carefully establishes the moment right before the murders start and then sadistically circles back to that moment over and over and over. But don't bother arguing with me if you think that's crazy. It's been hashed out. Just roll your eyes and move on.________________________________________________________Professional review, October '03:Eight months ago, Gus Van Sant gave us what remains, at this writing, the best film of 2003: Gerry, a hallucinatory account of two young men lost in an abstractly inhospitable landscape of the mind. Not content with this singular achievement, he now delivers Elephant, his meditation on the Columbine massacre, which is certain to remain the year's most reprehensible film. Formally impeccable but morally repugnant, the movie consists largely of long, elegant tracking shots that follow a small sampling of average teens through the claustrophobic corridors of an Oregon high school. (Elephant isn't set at Columbine, but Van Sant alludes to numerous details specific to that event.) These kids aren't characters in any traditional dramatic sense, though each one gets an identifying title card; what interests Van Sant—and us, for a while—is their uneasy relationship to their environment (also the subject of Gerry) and to each other as types.Van Sant's intentions are clear enough, and entirely worthy: He wants to explore the consciousness of the institution itself, locating an answer to our collective "why?" in a thousand humdrum details (though such media scapegoats as violent video games and bullying jocks also appear). But he makes a catastrophic error by toying with the chronology. We see the two killers, dressed in battle fatigues and carrying suspicious-looking tote bags, enter the school about 20 minutes into the film, and Van Sant returns again and again to a mundane event that precedes their arrival by seconds, thereby reminding us that the carnage is imminent. Despite his good intentions, he's made a film wholly dedicated to the creation of blissful innocents, whose impending slaughter we await with mounting dread.________________________________________________________Exchange with a friend, May '03 (from Cannes)You make it sound really really sad, but you haven't made it sound vile yet, to my mind. You wouldn't feel this way about any movie where you know that the protagonists are going to die, would you?Of course not. The difference is that the kids in Elephant exist only to become victims of a massacre. Would you be interested in a movie that spent an hour and a half depicting the quotidian events that might have taken place in the Twin Towers early on the morning of 9/11/01? We're introduced to Joe Businessman who's making an important presentation that day; a busboy training at Windows On The World and hoping to send most of his wages to his family in Ecuador; the guy who washes the windows, etc. No drama, no narrative, let's just get to know a few people well enough so that it'll be that much more horrific when the planes finally hit (and now imagine that the moment of impact takes maybe 15 minutes of screen time and we see people's heads being sheared off by wings and whatnot). All of this captured in long, bravura Steadicam shots that follow the "characters" down corridors and into elevators and so forth, so that it starts to seem as if the director is more captivated by his own technique than by the people whose senseless death he's about to reenact. If that sounds awesome to you—and I gather that it does to some folks around here—you'll love Elephant. Those who think the kids who died that day deserve better than to become pawns in someone's formalist exercise may feel some of the nausea that I did.(I think I've made this clear, but just in case, let me emphasize that it's not the violence per se that I find awful and exploitative. In fact, if the film had been wall-to-wall murders, as I understand Clarke's "Elephant" was, I probably wouldn't have despised it so.)