|
www.kevacho.com
©2002-2024
Kevin Michael Vance
Writer - Portland, Oregon
|
|
|
Go Back To Reviews
Title: ELEPHANT
Director: Gus Van Sant
Year: 2003
Reviewed: April 03, 2005
| Rating: |
|
 | |
 | |
| |
| |
Rice Cake-Lowest Rating |
[Rating Definitions]
|
|
|
Elephant the movie, is quite literally one of the worst films ever made. Therefore, it gets my dreaded RICE CAKE review.
True, I've never been one to get overly stimulated by Gus Van Sant's work. In fact, I've always found his films to embody everything I hate about "Independent", artsy-fartsy films (barring, of course, Good Will Hunting), Sant's movies have an enormous tendency to be both boring and pretentious. Two of the worst qualities any film could ever have. This is not to say you have to have explosions and gunfire or blood and guts to make a good movie, I truly enjoy some independent films, but there must… MUST I TELL YOU… be some modicum of tension or conflict. Heck, that's just good drama. Furthermore, just because you happen to be a small, "Indy" film does not mean you have to be boring, or pretentious; a simple fact that Sant is blissfully unaware of.
Elephant, the pointless, ridiculous film about a school shooting, is as bad as they come.
Honestly, I have no clue as to what Elephant is about. If someone out there can tell me, please do. Oh… and this is not because I am found lacking in intelligence. No, Elephant is simply inexplicable and completely devoid of any reason.
The film is (not to be too redundant) completely and utterly pointless. It is not really a film. It's an inane exercise in filming the backs of people's heads and clouds and the butt ends of cars. Seriously! There are long, drawn out scenes that are indescribably moronic, like when Sant shoots clouds incessantly and for no apparent reason. We get know emotional tie to any of the characters because Sant seems totally content in filming them from behind, as they slowly and with much boredom meander through the high school. We get only mere glimpses into their lives with asinine little snippets of dialogue, which could have been written by a first year film student, but sound as if they were written by an eighth grader. This movie is so flipping boring, so flipping pretentious, I wanted to throw my beer glass at the television screen. Horribly enough, I was cheering the two boys who went to school to shoot everyone, only because finally, and after what seemed decades of watching meaningless scene after meaningless scene, something actually happened in the film. However, Sant, in his infinite stupidity and conceited attitude, can even make a school shooting tedious and tiresome.
Elephant has no passion, no thought, and no aesthetic value whatsoever. The teenagers are vacuous and perfunctory, acting like no teenagers I have ever seen. There is a character, which we're introduced to near the end of the film, which has no dialogue and happens to be black (again, I'm not sure what Sant is trying to say here, if anything, but the only thing I got from him was how stupid and uninteresting this character was- Buddy or Bill or something). So… what does Buddy or Bill or whatever do in this film whose only purpose seems to be to trumpet mediocrity and lassitude. Well, I'll tell you. He- Buddy or Bill or whatever- walks through the high school, dumbly ignoring the flames spreading up the wall, dumbly ignoring the dead bodies laying in the halls. He proceeds to; might I add dumbly, walk right up to one of the high school shooters, and gets shot for his moronic efforts. This worthless scene was at least 2 minutes long, and this is why it failed. We knew nothing about Buddy or Bill or whatever. We did not overly care that he was killed. He was introduced to us far too late in the film for the audience to have any ties to his character. He was simply stupid. Or rather, the character the young actor played was stupid to such a degree it made me think that possibly Buddy or Bill or whatever was supposed to have been retarded.
Why even the shooters, who might have been gay, but we, the livid audience, really don't know. Because, once again, good ole Gus decided to do nothing with them as it regards character development, or even, character information.
Funnily enough, the shooters were not even bullied that badly. One of them had spit wads thrown at him. That's it! Nothing more! He wasn't beat up! He wasn't tortured! Spit wads… Whooee! Wow! Those bullies threw spit wads at me; let's go kill everyone!
Again, it was simply pointless.
Maybe that's Sant's "point", after all. Maybe the gist of the film is that school violence is pointless. Great! I can understand that. I can wrap my mind around that. But what I can't wrap my mind around is why he would make a movie that reflects the pointlessness of such unmitigated horror as a high school shooting unless it actually had some value or meaning, or even something as straightforward as a comment. Like for instance: school shootings are bad.
Elephant said and did nothing. Period. All it did was revel in its boredom and pretensions. Sant does such a horrible job with everything that you care more for the shooters than the people they shoot. There's no sense of character development. There's no sense of a 3 act story arc. There is no effort to write witty, if not simply interesting dialogue. There's no sense of pace or rhythm. There is literally nothing of worth in Elephant, nothing good or bad. Elephant is a hollow shell of a film, the dead skin of a snake sloughed off and left to rot in the rain.
Gus Van Sant's film, Elephant, is lacking in every conceivable aspect that makes and defines a good, or even slightly enjoyable, film.
Avoid this film, Elephant. Treat it as if it were flesh-eating bacteria. When you see it on the video shelves pass it by.
Instead, search your local video store (you will have to search hard) until you find a little-known, 80's film called, Heathers. Rent Heathers instead. I guarantee you; you will like Heathers more than Elephant.
|
|
