Elephant

[Brasil]

Three word review:

Worst. Movie. Ever.

In-depth review:

To put it nicely, this movie sucked my balls. Pardon my french, but this movie was...it made me want to hang myself.

Describing Elephant is difficult, not because it has depth or had any redeeming value. No, it is difficult to describe because there are not enough curse words in the English language, or any language, for that matter.

Van Sant's purpose of this movie, if it can be called "purpose" at all, seems to be to portray high school in its purest essence. Now, granted high school isn't the most exciting of times, sometimes, but when we are given 2 hours worth of footage that would do just as well with no sound whatsoever (read: SILENT PICTURE), with characters that by many considerations, would not be characters at all, only empty shells that have absolutely no basis for a reasonable foundation, cinematography that can be found in your local high school's TV Production class, we wonder what Van Sant thought he could pull off here.

I say this because quite frankly, when we see a filmmaker adapt the idea of Columbine, we expect something along the lines of a serious portrayal of what went on--perhaps even making a documentary about it (and not made by Michael Moore)--not what Van Sant has given us, which is in essence, an exaggeration of said school shootings. Elephant is...disrespectful to the subject matter of school shootings--really, disrespectful to the human race itself.

I don't mean to play high drama here, but I feel that any praise you hear of this film will be based on some Idealistic Tomfoolery of "high school is void, empty, tired, quiet." We all know--at least, all but one here, know that high school is not entirely vapid. There are positives of high school...the comraderie, for example.

I find it incredibly pretentious and downright disgraceful that Van Sant chose to ignore the good qualities of high school to concentrate on some...half-conceived notion of high school being utterly dead.

I'm getting rambly here, so I'll cut this short.

Elephant is by far the worst movie I've ever seen. While it may have some average cinematography, it is a clumsy piece of cinema from the man that gave us the most excellent Good Will Hunting. Elephant...needs to be put down with the biggest rifle you can find.

Thoughts? Flames? Anybody? Anybody? Anybody?

(Ferris Bueller quote...Ben Stein...that's how you show a droll high school environment.)