On E List of Movie Reviews

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Elephant (2003)

Rate: 3
Viewed: 2/25

Eleph03
2/25: Elephant is an appropriate title.

It's because the movie is so damn slow! Nothing happens for more than an hour, and I'm merely shown a parade of cute-looking high schoolers. You know, there are others who are ugly...lots and lots of them. Finally, the Columbine-like shooting happens. When it ends, the only word I can think of is "exploitation." I won't be surprised at all if I learn that some of the actual shooters watched the film beforehand for inspiration.

Why should I expect anything from Gun Van Sant? He clearly lost it during the making of Psycho. Had he taken a familiar approach that's emblematic of Keanu Reeves pictures such as Permanent Record and My Own Private Idaho before seguing to the shooting part, the outcome would've been much more successful. In other words, he didn't give anybody in Elephant meaningful character. Therefore, I can see Larry Clark of Kids and Bully doing a better job of it.

Forget the cheap tricks in terms of "maybe that explains why the two shooters are who they are." This kind of stuff takes many years to build up to the point when they decided to cross the Rubicon and were ready to die. Pretty much every time, after a mass shooting happens, we never know the true reasons why. But there are several things I've noticed that probably have attributed to the annual rise of mass shooting in schools.

One, there's no structure. Elephant showed me everything wrong with schools today. Kids walking around all over the place as if it's college and doing whatever they want had my head shaking. It wasn't uncommon to notice many kids loitering in the main office as if they had needs so important that were really trivial. Having attended a high school that enrolled over 2,000 students, I had only five minutes to get from one class to another in a massive building, no exceptions. During classes, nobody was ever in the hallway unless he had a pass.

Two is the absence of discipline. I used to be a secondary teacher and learned the hard truth of the job: nobody was allowed to mete out punishment that rose above detentions. As a result, putting up with the abusive working conditions was the norm which forced me to quit the profession forever and seek something else that's far better. Being a teacher isn't an attractive career nowadays. There are barely any good prospective candidates; hence, it's typical for schools to hire people from the bottom of the barrel which explains the arrests, especially of the sexual nature, and most have substitutes and uncertified teachers rounding out the bottom 25% including those very-hard-to-fill positions. High teacher turnover, along with little to no support from the administration, is what causes instability and erosion, preventing the potential of achieving a true community.

Three, the internet changed everything. Back then, people could focus and maintain their attention on anything for a long period of time. Today, nope...their brains are so scattered that they've become screen addicts with mixed-up priorities, leading to the breakdown of family unit and social communication. That makes dealing with kids extremely hard for schools because their problems have been multiplied so much that there aren't enough resources to address them all. Why the internet is dangerous is lack of barriers. Any conceivable idea can be fully explored online. Before the internet existed, people had to figure it out themselves, and information was hard to come by. That kept life grounded and simple.

Back to the film, just a few observations. These three girls named Brittany, Jordan, and Nicole? Ha! They were fucking losers. Only stupid teen girls would eat or drink so little and then throw up afterwards. Their vapid conversations were so unbelievably boring that I felt the urge to fast-forward the movie. I can believe some people would do what Benny (the black kid with yellow shirt) did when he should be fleeing from the building by any means necessary only because they aren't bright to begin with. When Eric was shot, it's his partner Alex who did it. I think he got so addicted to killing that he couldn't find anybody for a while and wanted to fulfill his need instantly. Plus, he's a psychopath and wanted to prove it by taking a further step.

All in all, Elephant serves no purpose except to show what it's like to be in the middle of a school shooting.