Elephant is the heartwarming story of a lovable goof who must help Santa Claus find a successor by Christmas Eve before Christmas is ruined forever. Along the way he must enlist the help of a runaway, street-smart kid with a heart of gold and convince a disillusioned man that the true spirit of Christmas really is still alive. No, sorry, that's Ernest Saves Christmas, and I'm afraid that Elephant doesn't have anywhere near the maturity or insight of that film.
The real Elephant is the creation of Gus Van Sant (who's probably Portuguese or something) after he saw a story on the CBS nightly news about school shootings and decided that if he made it seem really artsy, he could get away with his movie sucking. The best way to describe this movie is to compare it to taking a trip to the house of
My bad!
your aunt who always questions your sexuality, but when you get there you find the house is abandoned. Then your mother calls you to tell you that you never actually had an aunt, that the person you remember as your aunt was actually just your uncle Lyle after he'd been drinking and had put on women's clothing. Furthermore, you're uncle died six years ago in a horrible water cooler mishap and would you please pick up some yogurt and throwing stars on the way home.
I liked the other image better.
Of course, when I say that, I refer only to the ending credits, the rest of the movie is just bullshit. Van Sant takes numerous risks with Elephant, none of which pay off. For example, instead of going with the accepted custom of using people who act professionally, or 'actors', to act in his movie, Van Sant pulls random pretty white high school kids from off the street to be in his movie. I guess the idea is that by not using any professional actors the movie will be more 'real' or something. Of course, if that makes sense to you, then you're probably a Sex Pistols fan. The movie also uses bold new cinematic techniques such as "Unnecessarily Long Shots of People Walking Away", and "Following People Around While Absolutely Nothing Happens". Van Sant even goes to the trouble of showing us the exact same scene three times. A scene in which nothing happens except that a friend informs me that if you look closely you can see one of the characters grab his crotch.
As for the 'plot', Elephant tells the tale of Alex and Eric (Not Dylan and Eric because this isn't Columbine at all. Nu-uh. It takes place in a whole different state and everything so there's no way they could be related) two losers who make a pact to get laid before the end of their senior year of high school. However, everything goes awry when they start playing violent video games, watching documentaries on Hitler, become homosexual and order automatic assault rifles directly to their house from the Internet.
Despite everything else though, Elephant is primarily a movie with a moral - school shootings aren't cool or interesting, instead they're really boring and feature bad acting. That wasn't enough though, Gus Van Sant knew that to really get through to the kids he'd have to come up with an even more powerful message against school shooting. That message of course is that school shootings are gay. Even though it may seem like Gus Van Sant just gratuitously made them homosexual for no reason whatsoever since it never really comes up except for one scene, and has no bearing on anything else in the movie, he was really just trying to show people everywhere that only fags shoot up schools.
If you're going to shoot up the school, you better have the right threads.
Elephant is also notable for the worst depiction of high school ever. For a movie that's supposed to be all 'realistic' and 'hardcore', you could probably get a better idea of a real high school by watching episodes of Doogie Howser. Yes, essentially I am saying that a fictional depiction of a Hospital is more accurate than this depiction of a High School. Every single character is some kind of vamped up stereotype taken directly from The Breakfast Club.
There are some people who are going to say that I'm just not 'deep' or 'French' enough to get this movie, but those people are pretentious douchefaces. First of all, I sat through this entire movie, that alone should be enough to get me a Purple Heart, or at least, a concussion that could potentially lead to me losing the part of my brain that realizes when stuff sucks. Honestly, I'm pretty artsy and pretentious myself, and it wasn't that that got to me, it was all the extreme suckage.
Doogie never needed High School.
Now, throughout the whole movie, Gus Van Sant is essentially taking a giant shit on his audience. However, he saves the greatest defecation for the final scene. Now, I've known movies to end in some pretty wacky and creative places, but one place you really shouldn't end your movie is right in the middle of the climax, immediately after raising new questions. It's not edgy or 'totally awesome' it's just lazy, he might as well have had the shooter suddenly wake up and go "Whoa... it was all a dream," then realize that he was still wearing the headband from the shooting and continue "Or was it...?"
So in the spirit of Elephant I've decided to completely disrespect my audience and just en-
