Movie Review: Elephant

Jessie Abbot told me to see Elephant and I heard about it a few other times after that. So today I watched it. I was dissappointed. It is an indy movie about a school shooting, which sounds good on paper, but when they made this movie it wasn't very good in my opinion. First of all, most of the movie had nothing to do with anything... and not in a GOOD David Linklater type way either, it was random boring stuff that kids do. For example the camera made you watch as a student went through the whole process of developing film and it showed another kid play the whole Fur Elise (sp?) song on the piano... the whole thing! It was interesting at first how the director used really long takes that could be even 10 minutes long at times. That got boring afterawhile because the plot was really boring and nothing was happening. All this put together makes a very slow boring movie to watch. I could have gone out to the store and came back and not missed anything important or interesting at all. Also, the movie shows you the perspective of a bunch of different kids, so when they interact you are forced to watch the interaction take place over and over and over again from different views. I think they went a little overboard with their "independant techniques", but then again, it probably wouldn't have mattered if the plot was good... which it wasn't. Like I said, it had nothing to do with anything until about the last 20 minutes. Another thing that annoyed me was all the different examples of bad acting. On top of that, a lot of the things they said and did weren't realistic at all. There were a bunch of kids that didn't even really mind there being a school shooting it seemed like, they just stood around taking their time leaving and such. Especially this one jock type kid who goes around looking for the shooters. What the hell? Nobody would do that! He was all non-chalent about seeing dead bodies on the ground as well. There was also a ridiculous scene in which the two shooters were shooting off some rounds in their garage, and the gun shots were so incredibly fake. There was this big blast and it looked really cheesy. I don't care if it was low-budjet or anything, they should have never used those weird cheesy gun effects. As if all this wasn't enough, there are no, I repeat NO elephants in the whole movie! That was the final straw for me. I recommend not seeing this movie.
2 1/2 stars