Elephant: A Film By Gus Van Sant
by Gus Van Sant
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Actor: Alex Frost, Elias McConnell, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Jordan TaylorDirector: Gus Van Sant
Brand: Warner Brothers
Cinematographer: Harris Savides
Writer: Gus Van Sant
Producer: Bill Robinson
Producer: Dany Wolf
Producer: Diane Keaton
Producer: J.T. LeRoy
Producer: Jay Hernandez
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.37:1
Running Time: 81 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-05-04
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Hbo Home Video
DVD Reviews of Elephant: A Film By Gus Van Sant
DVD Review: No Characterization and Flawed
Summary: 1 Stars
This is why I think this movie is trash (sorry, I am usually very reserved).
1. Pretentious
2. No characterization
3. Lack of psychological insight
I rented this movie based on Gus Van Sant's reputation and the synopsis attracts me. I do not rate this movie one star because it couldn't live up to its promise, but because everything is done wrong.
The direction is what you'd call an art house movie. But an "art" ought to get someone to think, and this one doesn't. The movie is a juxtaposition of various pretty pictures without some coherent meaning.
Maybe I just don't get it. Example, when John slapped his butt for a photo shoot, it was ingenious the first time, but after the third time, it gets old. In poetry, if a message is repeated, it must mean something or to reinforce some idea. But I'm sorry, I don't get how John slapped his own butt is a symbol of anything. Bottom line: cut the crap out in the editing room.
Whoever did the music design ought to be guillotined. Why Moonlight Sonata? How does it enhance the mood of the movie? But none of that really matter as long as it does not overrides the background ambiance, which brilliantly brings out the atmosphere of the school, whereas the music score falls short on it. Discordance, yes, but why do it when John entered the school. Was he the villain who disrupts the school? Incorrect usage of motif. F for music design.
Given Gus Van Sant's reputation is built on gay coming of age story, I don't blame him for choosing some nice looking boys in his movies (though I think it's a little exploitative a la Andy Warhol). But what is their purpose in the movie if their characters are not developed? Was John a hero? Were Eric and Alex villains or anti-heroes? No clear sense of direction.... What's Eric's and Alex's motive to go on a rampage? Were they bullied? I didn't see that in the movie, but I get the cue maybe John was and was misunderstood by the principal. Why didn't he go on a rampage? Erm..., maybe because people don't snap like that easily? Why Columbine and other school massacres happened? Did production team discuss any of the possibilities why Alex and Eric would want to kill people like that? Did they ask the young actors who played the roles? This is not a pretty picture with no substance, is it? (sorry, that's a rhetorical question)
The characterization is as vague as the question, are Alex and Eric gay? You get to see them kiss, but you don't know if they are gay or not. Maybe it's just a goodbye kiss, or maybe they're just emos without the makeup. If they were lovers, how could Alex kill Eric like that? If they were bullied in school and depend on each other to cope with the situation, how COULD they do that? Characterization: F minus.
A movie like this should offer possible explanation that'll get people to think about the issue, and this one merely feeds the public with preexisting stereotype. It contains no psychological insight as to why bad things happened. This is NOT art. This is pretension.
DVD Review: Poignant and Haunting
Summary: 5 Stars
It goes without saying: this film is not for those with abnormally short attention spans, or anybody whose idea of great cinema is "Transporter 2." However, anybody keen on Tarkovsky or some of Kubrick's more languorous pictures shouldn't have any problem giving Elephant the time of day it deserves.
This is a film that sticks in the mind because of its utter reality; although the direction is heavily stylized, the conversations, vocal inflections, everyday encounters, and so forth that occur in the film are banal (read: realistic) as can be. The scruffy kids that roam the halls in Elephant's high school are not at all unlike people the viewer might've known during their own time in the same place, which makes the events of the film all the more poignant.
Nothing really "happens" in Elephant, leading up to the tragic shooting; that is, nothing relative to the big action and constant revelations of your typical Hollywood flick. But the random conversations and normal occurances are moving, because the viewer knows all hell is about to strike loose, as well as because these people seem seem so normal, and human.
A particularly memorable scene is one in which the camera pans slowly across the killer Alex's room as he plays Fur Elise on the piano and his friend (the other killer) idles away on the computer. The combination of the hauntingly beautiful music, with the camera pan revealing what seems to be just another suburban teenage boy's bedroom, when he is of course anything but, is truly chilling.
Elephant doesn't make any declarative statements about why people kill, or what we can do to stop it. It simply glides along, following the miniscule daily trials and tribulations of a handful of high school kids, culminating, unexpectedly for them, in tragedy. Above all, Elephant is a triumph of superb directorial vision; beautifully shot and executed, with a fluid style that could aptly be termed "visual poetry." After you've seen the film, those long Steadicam shots stalking the doomed students through idle school hallways will haunt your memory forever.
DVD Review: 1 star out of 4
Summary: 1 Stars
The Bottom Line:
With a complete lack of characterization, unbelievably pretentious direction (Van Zant uses so many long takes that I found myself looking forward to cuts) and some of the slowest pacing imaginable (in an 81 minute movie no less), Elephant is one of the most overrated movies I can name.
DVD Review: Little bit of poetic license going on but it's not all bad
Summary: 3 Stars
Elephant: A Film By Gus Van Sant
Elephant is an adequate sit down and watch movie, however some people will become bored with it, there are many many scenes of people just walking, all have significance but that might drain some people after a while, there really isn't much talking in this movie. There's also some background political agenda crap going on here, take for example the kids order guns online and a movie equivalent to Fedex just delivers them to these two kids. Which if you know anything about firearm transfers, you'd know that no one can directly receive a firearm through a courier service (including the mail) unless they are licensed dealers and have loads of proof and trust me, those kids would not be able to trick a licensed dealer into thinking they themselves are dealers to get those guns delivered to them. They also received ammo with the guns they received, which is further political BS because ammo cannot legally be shipped with firearms. I suppose if you want to overlook politics you could claim poetic license, like the scene in which one of the boys opens up a box he just received with a Bushmaster Carbon 15 rifle and just test fires it in his garage as if the police wouldn't arrive swiftly to his home or something firing off a rifle in his garage. I don't get the focus on the blond kid on the front of the DVD cover either, the movie followed him and the trouble with his either drunk or burned out (I couldn't tell which) father but it wasn't really significant, the two kids that did the actual shooting when going into the building told him to 'get out of here' similar to Eric Harris telling Brooks Brown to 'get out of here' before the Columbine school shooting, but the blond kid wasn't a friend of the shooters in this film so it didn't really do anything other than serve as a similarity to the Columbine school shooting. But overall the movie is ok, certainly not great. I think the movie Zero Day is a little bit better, you get to know the characters better in Zero Day and it's a bit easier to watch. The fact also that they made the two shooters gay was a little strange and irrelevant to the plot as well and really had no need in the film other than to kill two minutes.
DVD Review: not the right zone!
Summary: 2 Stars
couldn't watch it on my DVD player but it was OK at work so it made things difficult for me.
Hope it won't happen again...
CB
Description of Elephant: A Film By Gus Van Sant
Winner of the Palme d'Or and Best Director prizes at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Gus Van Sant's (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) Elephant takes us inside an American high school on one, single ordinary day that very rapidly turns tragic. Elephant demonstrates that high school life is a complex landscape where the vitality and beauty of young lives can shift from light to darkness with surreal speed. It's an ordinary high school day. Except that it's not.DVD Features:
Featurette:On the Set of Elephant: "Rolling Through Time"
Full Screen Version
TV Spot:HBO Films Spot
Theatrical Trailer
Elephant, the elegant and unsettling movie from Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting), depicts students at a high school before and during a harrowing, Columbine-style shooting. The movie follows one young boy who takes over the wheel from his drunken dad while returning from lunch, then loops back in time and follows another student who crosses paths with the first, then loops back and follows another--all captured in long, unedited tracking shots that are serene and unhurried, even when two boys in camouflage gear, carrying heavy bags, arrive at the school and begin shooting. Elephant doesn't attempt to explain their behavior; it simply places the audience back in the brief yet interminable window of adolescence, when life is trivial and painfully important at the same time. Your reaction to Elephant will depend as much on your life experiences as anything in the movie itself. --Bret Fetzer
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