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| Elephant (mild spoilers) by Bill Dungsroman 09/19/2004, 2:26am PDT | ||||
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| Elephant is a film by director Gus van Sant concerning the Columbine shootings. At 81 minutes, it's pretty amazing that it seems so long in the beginning, but that's part of the point: kids going about what was supposed to be another drab, normal day. It's a rather good film, for what it is. Certain students are fleshed out (to one degree or another) to draw the viewer in for the climax of the film. And, since we all know what that climaz is, we know it's coming from the moment we check the DVD out from Blockbuster, the film and all events leading up to it naturally are thick with it. The elephant, as it were. You'll be searching the periphery of every frame for signs of the Dastardly Duo for the first 45 minutes, as I imagine van Sant wanted. The film is as brutal as you would expect it to be, sudden gunshots and kids dropping like rocks. You'll flinch more than a few times. The film deliberately tries to avoid making too much of anything beyond focusing on some students in varying, seemingly random ways and intensities. A little bit here and there about Harris and Kleibold, but nothing artificially enhanced tomake the audience think Oh, so that's why, nor any variation thereof. And, the film just sort of ends, in a very odd spot in the sequence of events. I'm taking that as part of the point: randomness, byond the actual shooting, there is not real five-act Shakespearian tragedy or tightly-written suspense story apparent in this event. Two kids woke up one day and shot up their school; the end.
Of course, my favorite part of the film is when the two are chilling together at home, playing a FPS on their computer. I'm not sure if they intentionally meant to make the game - an obvious fake (I hope) - as far from Doom, the notorious favorite of the boys', but it sure as Hell is as far from it as possible. The game sure looks like a winner: you running around a flat white landscape, shooting dudes that all look alike with a variety of real-world firearms. You shoot the guys, they fall down, sink under the turf and remain with the bottom halves of their legs sticking up forever. The game helpfully keeps a Body Count. That's the game, shooting the same dudes at close range and watching them die unrealistically. Go for the high score, Buddy! The film in no way tries to make the viewer really think that computer games influenced these kids. No real effort is made for that, other that that they were picked on (one of them, a little bit) and that they were able to purchase Tech-9s and other assault weaponry online. Some of the timeframe is hard to follow (interesting since the film spent a lot of time interlocking timeframes between different kids by their respective POVs), but at one point it seems that the only reason the kids finally went for it was they got their last assualt rifle in the mail. It's part of the point; there's some circumstantial evidence for motive but nobody really knows, beyond that the kids just finally did it one day. |
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Elephant (mild spoilers) by 09/19/2004, 2:26am PDT  You forgot to mention that it's unrelentingly boring by 09/19/2004, 12:17pm PDT Re: You forgot to mention that it's unrelentingly boring by 09/20/2004, 2:42pm PDT Re: You forgot to mention that it's unrelentingly boring by 09/22/2004, 6:44am PDT Re: You forgot to mention that it's unrelentingly boring by 09/22/2004, 12:27pm PDT |
