Most boring and absolutly emo movie ever made. I dont wish this abomination on even my worst enemy.

While I really liked the way it was filmed, I really felt Elephant was a collective critic wank off to Gus Van Sant.

It failed to realistically explore the cause of the crime, instead relying on the usual: they were bullied in school, liked violent games, ordered weapons online easily and for some odd reason were actually closet homosexuals.

I understand that he wanted to portray it as an ordinary day. But come on... that doesn't mean it has to drone on and on...

The actual events and reasons for Columbine would have made for a much more psychologically compelling picture because it's not easy to pinpoint one facet of their psyche that caused this.

I really hope someone can explain to me why this movie is revered, I felt History of Violence was pretty shit too but again there was a collective critics wank off to that film as well. I mean the same people said Blade Runner and Dr Strangelove and 2001 were shit when they came out. Yet they are classic years on.

Marketing. Elephant was sold particularly well to European critics and it played to their misconceptions/prejudices about the youth of America (evil computers, evil video games, evil guns, evil homosexuality, evil Beethoven just to be cheeky). The Cannes victory was purely a function of a bad year at Cannes and the fact that van Sant, like Lynch and the Dardennes, is an obsessive and repetitive auteur.

I find Elephant to be more a MoMA-style video installation rather than a document of Columbine. I want to hang it on a wall and it works particularly well on that level. It is still one of the most beautiful DV movies out there. And I really love all of the quiet, long, hand-held tracking shots. No American high school has ever been so quiet and pretty and emotionally barren as the high school in this film.

But the History of Violence was bollocks.

archchef - Never ever see GERRY. Besides making ELEPHANT seem as action-packed as STAR WARS, it is like watching paint dry while you are trapped and suffocating inside the paint.

Discarding because this post has less than 3 votes in its first 48 hours in the queue.