Elephant: A Film By Gus Van Sant
by Gus Van Sant
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Actor: Alex Frost, Elias McConnell, Eric Deulen, John Robinson (IX), Jordan Taylor (II)Director: Gus Van Sant
Brand: Warner Brothers
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: 80 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: Haunting, strange, not perfect, but still very good....
Summary: 4 Stars
In 2003 (or a few years before perhaps), Gus Van Sant got drunk on Bela Tarr films, which is a great intoxicant. Tarr is a giant in cinema today, and his films are masterpieces of light, shadow, photography, acting, and some of the most extraordinary camerawork ever in cinema. Gus made two films with an obvious debt to Tarr, Gerry and this film, Elephant. Elephant is the better of the two films.
Elephant has an eerie, haunting, etheral quality to it as Gus's camera glides through the high school. He shows high school life to be tedious, silly, heartless, sad, occasionally funny, and eventually violent, as Gus emulates the Columbine massacre at the end of the film (even though very little violence is actually shown). While the film isn't perfect, it's light years better than Gerry, which is a very misguided attempt to emulate Bela Tarr's style and substance (Van Sant got the style, but missed the substance). Both Gerry and Elephant have improvised dialogue, and it's a major drawback to both films, but more so with Gerry. Elephant's dialogue is forgettable, but luckily there's not much of it. Much of the film isn't told with dialogue but with glances and wide shots, and Van Sant uses these tools quite effectively. He also makes haunting use of Beethoven's Fur Elise, one of Beethoven's most famous works. The film has a slow pace, but it's good for the material.
Elephant is a good chapter in the Van Sant catalog, which has masterpieces (My Own Private Idaho), misguided films (Gerry), and absolute garbage (his remake of Pyscho).
DVD Review: Elephant
Summary: 2 Stars
This film is as disturbing a film about high school shootings as can be made. Director Gus van Sant tracks two boys who ultimately decide the only way they can cope with life is to shoot up their school. As if this isn't bad enough, the final scenes more or less glorify the act by not showing how the surviving boy (after he shoots his co-consprator) ends up. Presumably he shoots two more students in a kitchen freezer but we don't know.
This film is very disturbing and most movie-goers will not appreciate any part of it. How can a movie have entertainment value when it raises the question of will this happen at the schools our children go to? The film doesn't really show anything that might prevent a school shooting, and at no time in the film are any police arriving or distraught parents gathering in the parking lot. What I found most distasteful was when the one boy told the other to most of all "have fun" while systematically slaughtering innocent classmates and school staff.
If film makers have a license, van Sant's should be revoked.
DVD Review: Better Than Gerry
Summary: 3 Stars
How my ratings work:
5 - I really liked/loved it
4 - I liked it
3 - Could've been better/worth a look
2 - Just didn't live up to the potential
1 - Simply aweful
I just finished watching this movie, I'd been interested in seeing it for some time now. While it could've been a little more interesting, overall it's not a totally bad movie. The direction is good in the long takes and the acting well done even by the smaller parts in the movie. I will say that I liked this movie a whole lot better than Gus Van Sant's other film in his "Death Trilogy" Gerry and have yet to see his third film Last Days. Some may think this glorifies violence, but that's really not the case with this movie. If anything, it shows how wrong violence is, that there's never a good reason to kill another human being. It also shows that teachers and parents need to be more involved with the children in their lives; that could prevent things like this from happening. This may not be a movie I'd own personally, but I do think it's worth watching at least once.
DVD Review: Not to rehash the boredom
Summary: 1 Stars
I found myself saying out loud several times "come on already! get on with it!". So although I do agree it was extremely boring, there's no real need to point that out again.
Meanwhile, reading the poor reviews of this movie (and I agree with them all for the most part), there was something I picked up on that no one else seemed to. The lack of any real plot, the actual reason I believe the director didn't get into the "lives" and "depth" of the students, is because he wanted you to sympathize with the shooters. He purposely showed just enough of these people, the hazing, the bad parenting, the oblivious teachers... to make you dislike them.
At the end of the day (or lunch as the case may be), the shooters were only striking back at their tormentors, their parents, and their "mentors" who were supposed to help them and looked the other way.
I don't condone such acts obviously, but I do insist that PARENTS be more involved with their children, and the people who are supposed to be looking out for their children while they're in school. Would it kill you to ask your kid "how was your day?", "are you being helped when you need it?", and most of all "are you being bullied?"
I also insist you skip this movie. If you feel the need to watch it, there's a 2 minute scene where the blonde shooter is explaining to the Principal he didn't deserve to live because he looked the other way, refused to help him when he complained, offered to let him live ("go now before I change my mind"), then shot him in the back. That was pretty much the entire movie in a nutshell.
I recommend you see "Bully" instead.
DVD Review: OVERRATED DRIBBLE
Summary: 1 Stars
Skip this crappy art film that adds nothing to the columbine shootings media outburst and watch a real movie: Paul F. Ryan's Home Room. This movie was terrible and literally unwatchable.
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.Running Time: 81 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre:?DRAMA UPC:?026359222924Elephant, 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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