What the fuck was I supposed to take from this movie?

As far as I could tell, there was no moral, no resolution, no purpose. Just taking the Columbine massacre and re-enacting it.

Oh well.

It wasn't even that, was it? Different school. Different kids. Different bodycount. Different timeline.

You didn't connect with one character. It was like, this kid is cool. This kid is mean. These girls are catty. This kid died. This kid lived. Oh ... and the shooters were gay, what the hell.

this is the intention, to show how meanless and absurd was the tragedy

Yeah, that's what everyone keeps saying.

I will say one thing, though. The representation of high school was pretty much dead-on. But obviously that's got more to do with the ad-libbed nature of the script than anything.

And I don't think the shooters were gay. I just saw it as a situation where they didn't want to go out without SOME sort of experience. But that could just be me.

I wished they used JT Leroy's script instead, he's disgustingly brilliant, at least he got an "associate producer" credit
I did like the video camera work in that film though

Yeah, the message I got from this film wasn't anything about Columbine, it was ... "Look how long Gus Van Sant can keep the camera rolling without cutting."

not a good movie

I took this film as one that you're just supposed to watch and enjoy the feel, the camera work, etc. It goes from being almost ghostlike to savage in the last few frames, but the camera work never really changes. It's almost like the wish of the average civilian to see a shocking event take place first hand has been granted. I really enjoyed it.

I liked it

check out a film called Zero Day (I think) its basically the same subject matter just an entirely different take. Its interesting to compare the two.

"THIS is our high school. IT is our worst enemy."

Wow... I liked it A LOT

Elephant is a movie about loneliness, there´s no moral, just a story. How everybody can be so desperate wanting someone to pay them some attention. Some boys are not integrated in the school, and sick of everything they take revenge and kill whoever they want.

Elephant is that huge thing that everybody should see and noone does. Teenagers desesperated asking for someone to notice them... while everybody live in their own world attending their own bussiness...

It´s a great film.

Has anyone else seen this Gus Van Sant movie? I caught it the other night by chance on HBO. IMO there is a review on IMDB that sums it up for me very well. He said that there is no way anyone would watch this movie all the way through unless they knew the shooting was going to happen at the end and I agree. The last 15 or 20 mins is pretty good, but overall the movie was done very artsy for arts sake and I don't think it worked at all. Catch it if you can just to see the ending but thats about it.

I think it worked pretty well. It felt very mundane and uneventful, sort of like an average school day. I don't see why they wouldn't work. I was never bored.

I don't quite know how I feel about the shooting. It didn't really affect me...maybe that's because I identified more with the shooters, though.

The only thing I didn't like was that there were a few moments where Van Sant came dangerously close to stereotyping the shooters. [SPOILERS] Making them closet homosexuals? Making one of them randomly shoot the other one? What the fuck?[/SPOILERS]

Overall, it's good. It's one of those films that really burns itself into your mind.

Zero Day >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Elephant

But Elephant didn't suck as much as some think. It's not even the most dull and uneventful Van Sant movie. Now Last Days, that shit was boring.

I guess it was worth the watch and hell, I made a thread about it so apparently it had some effect on me. I guess it's not that it was boring it's just that the conversations between the kids could have been better. Seems like the writing was done very quickly and not much thought went into it. Overall this type of movie could have been done a lot better.

If I remember correctly, the dialogue between the kids was largely improvised. So the blame for their conversation being boring rests upon their shoulders, not that of the writer.

Ah, well, you could sure tell!

I know that something interesting and dramatic was suppose to happen in this movie, but I must have blinked and missed it.

I think the movie did a great job at showing just how detached from reality two kids would have to be in order to methodically walk through a school and blow innocent people away.

I liked it.