Quoted: seems to put a lot of blame l on video games, history channel, gun websites, blah blah blah
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Haha, dude what the hell. It showed the blonde kid playing some generic FPS for like 15 seconds, gave maybe two minutes total of screen time to the kids watching a Hitler documentary and showed one of them looking at a gun website for maybe five seconds. Those are all singular facets of the story. You're just pulling reasons to hate it out of your ass.
I think the reason this film was panned was because the source material isn't typical audience friendly Hollywood stuff. To Van Sant's credit, I personally think he did the best he could given that the plot of the movie is about a bunch of children murdering other children. Yes the depiction of a gun being delivered directly to the kid's home and him signing for it was absurd, but the rest of it seems pretty spot on. Some teenagers are bitchy little assholes, some are popular jerkoffs, some of them are terribly socially inept, others are depraved homosexual loners that like killing people. To be honest, other than the gun coming straight to the kid's house I didn't think the rest of the film was "anti-gun". Sure there were technical errors like the kids not aiming or the Carbon 15 not having sights, but those are trivial gripes and not indicative of any anti-gun bias. (Note: having said all that, I'm sure Van Sant is a rabid anti after having read a few interviews of him, but I don't think his stance on guns is evident in this film)
Elephant is a film based on historic incidents featuring fictionalized characters, probably to avoid possible lawsuits from the families of the Columbine victims. I realize that the film was slow paced and frankly I'm surprised so many posters here actually had the attention span to sit through it. The long steady-cam shots can be rather monotonous, but that's how GVS chose to tell the story. In Elephant, the steady cam and dolly shots were a poorly implemented means of building suspense. Note to GVS, you're not Kubrick!
None of the actors' performances were particularly striking, but it seemed realistic and true to what most high school aged kids are like. Actually I take that back, the nerdy library assistant Michelle was portrayed very well IMO. Though she spoke but a handful of words, the scene in the locker room when she was sitting in front of the gossipy little bitches is spot-on accurate to what high school is like these days. And the character of Michelle did exactly what I imagined she would do, she sat there and took it without saying a word to the others.
Overall I give Elephant a 6.5/10. It's a depressing film about a depressing subject.