Cheap Elephant: A Film By Gus Van Sant (DVD) (Gus Van Sant) Price

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Customer Reviews of Elephant: A Film By Gus Van Sant

Good for people who have been out of touch with American culture
If you are so out of touch with American culture that you need an 80 minute snore-inducing meditation on how high school students have become desensitized to events around them and to their own emotions, I guess this film is a basic primer. Other than that, the premise, structure and tone are utterly predictable. We see a day in the life of contemporary youth or "yout" as Cousin Vinny would have said. In a flat affect universe where children drive their drunk parents to work; where girls bicker about how hot a guy is and whether they will get into fights if found out they've been talking about him; where a pierced couple non-chalently asked a student photographer if they would like it if they take pics of them naked in a park; and a couple of students carrying a couple of sacks of combat fatigue-fashion statement duffle bags filled with unseen objects sticking obtrusively and obviously for the audience to see (they're not fencing equipment) we immediately learn (if we have any brain cells) that these two guys are going to pull a Columbine at the high school. When they get down to business, the do so in the same flat-affect way the rest of the students respond to classroom discussions of gayness; girl/boy, boy/boy experimentation; the usual doofus school administrator with the snarly school papaish attitude toward a student being late. When the two military manquee shooters start shooting, not only is there killing spree is not only a dull, matter-of-fact mission--carried out with the same enthusiasm of taking a calculus exam, but the victims more or less accept their fate as if to say, "well, I guess it's our school's time to have a killing spree by a couple of the misguided among us." So they get shot wanly and as they die, others respond to them wanly. It's all done with this veneer of artsy, short on dialogue, long on slow-mo, minimal dialogue camera movement that tries to complement the actor's affectlessness by depicting the action in this non commital styled "I'm out of here, but if I get murdered, at least I don't have to finish my science project next week" choreography. It's pretense through and through; what was Gus van Sant thinking after doing some really good films like Good Will Hunting and My Own Private Idaho. Guess he was slumming it with the affluent millenium generation, or is really short on material.

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Blood Trails
"Elephant" attempts to be profound. We follow long shots of students going through their day, developing film, eating in the cafeteria, etc. There is a real mix of actors who make it seem very life-like. However, we need to wade through a lot to get to the promised bang at the end. The absence of an explanation for what motivates Alex to plan this is perhaps the only way it could be handled. We see Alex lives in a house where his parents are like absentee landlords. There appears to be little supervision or interaction. Moreover, there does not seem to be much love. When Alex, played by Alex Frost in his only film role I could find, showers with his friend Eric played by Eric Deulen, it seems like maybe at least the boys have found someone to whom they could relate. However, Alex proves to be a master manipulator. The scene at the end where his buddy shows up to report on all his kills and receives a bullet to the chest is chilling. However, this school is strange. There are empty halls. Shots ring out and the instructor appears oblivious until he drags a dead student back into the room smearing a blood trail behind him. I know that this subject is a difficult one. Nevertheless, I found the film to lack sensitivity and certainly it lacked heroes. Diane Keaton produced this Gus Van Sant-directed film. Van Sant received a Best Director award and the film was honored with the Golden Palm. It did not seem so stunningly brilliant to me, more plodding and awkward. Why would anyone want to watch this more than once? Taxi.

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Dont Waist Your Time!
I found that this movie was totally BORING! You couldn't understand anything untill the last 15 minutes of the movie. To make a movie about a school bombing/shooting they could have at least introduced the characters better but they didn't. They also did not have an interesting line about what was going on!! You didn't know that they were planing the bombing untill the last 15 minutes of the show and before then it was a bunch of non since. The whole hour and something was totally boring and a waist of time to watch, it does make you think though at the end of it when the bombing took place. They could have did a lot better with this one in introducing characters and family and having better scenes. If I would have seen this at the movies I would have fallen asleep!