should I see Gus Van Sant's Elephant

Glad you liked it and my joke didn't put you off.

2001- Moretti- the son's room- crap.......

no way! it was brilliant. horrendously sad but brilliant. the feelings of the family were so accurately portrayed, internal emotion was shown so subtly and so well. i saw it about a year after a sudden bereavement and pretty much cried the whole way through (and i hate crying at films) but it never seemed maukish or false just a very genuine depiction of the effects of a family tragedy.

but it's so sad that my nanni moretti recommendation remains, as it's been for a long time, dear diary.

I really liked his first two or three films!

I think i agree with you, though I've never thought about it until now. Well, maybe I did at the time.

i am looking forward to the kurt cobain one--and you continue to prove my point A, do you like any movies with sexual (or queer) content?

amst made his objections clear here:

van sant seems to be all about "we can never really know the answer to this riddle, so i will make a movie that's calculatedly noncommital and obscure and transparently meaningless." which he seems to think is a radical gesture.

and as far as queer content goes i've seen amst praise Todd Haynes a fair bit here.

Exactly. "Elephant" is a vacuous movie.

drugstore is a perfect example, its the only movie i know of that talks about the joy of heroin, people do it for a reason, they do it because it tastes good and it feels good--

and because it is a release from the unescable poverty, etc..

To paraphrase Henry James: the choice of form reflects the artist's moral stance.

Well, I didn't like the shower scene, which I said in my first post.

Of course artists can exercise moral judgement but I don't think it necessary in art, nor does it get at what I personally find interesting, ie being transported to another world, to be an aesthetic experience, an emotional experience etc. When I'm listening to Mozart's Requiem or whatever I am not thinking about whether Mozart has made any moral judgement and I generally feel the same way when I watch a movie. What I got from Elephant was this looking-back sense of yearning sadness at everyday things when you know this cataclysmic event is going to happen and destroy everything.

And yet Raspberry Reich gets generally favorable reviews at last year's Toronto FF.

Either you're neuteured or being imprecise, because I don't understand what the fuck you're trying to say.

so the movie should be the same thing (cf pamela smart and too die for)

anthony i cant tell if your serious. i think the media orgy has meaning and in fact as a hs student in the time, shit turned on bracketed tvs roundabt two oclock, i havent parsed or even returned to it that much but it has meaning certainly, in some counterweight way, for me, i suppose

ok city bombing not completely comparable here cos you don't grow out of state power.

we know all these but ignore them already right?

And I insist: a director cannot eschew his responsibility to shape and even reorder experience. Van Sant's approach may work in a documentary, but not in a film of fiction. Van Sant's blankness extends even to his direction of the actors. We don't give a shit about them; they're bodies, faces, and without VS steering us it's all too easy to either change the channel or project onto them one's own lusts.

I suppose we're not going to agree.

I'm tempted to keep going, just because I love this movie so much - I especially love what you hate about it: that VS encourages his adult audience to admit that it knows nothing about the lives of these teenagers (& probably about teenagers in general) and doesn't actually care at all unless they should happen to threaten the adult sphere; in the final analysis I think VS's refusal to "steer" is a gesture of great compassion - but yeah you're right, you hated the movie, we ain't gonna see eye-to-eye here

VS encourages his adult audience to admit that it knows nothing about the lives of these teenagers

That's right. The ethereal aesthetic, the non-sensical teenage soundbites really distance the viewer from the kids. We don't, we can't relate. In that sense, it is meaningless.

I really disagree with this. Why is putting the viewer in a moral quandry the one exalted standard by which a film is deemed a "success" or "failiure"? It seems like a narrow-minded approach to criticism.

That said, I thought this movie was good but I have a few complaints. I won't claim VS gives some sort of perfectly objective impartial viewpoint here (haha...) -- and I do think it might have been stronger without the Hitler TV, violent videogames etc., -- but I like that he offers very little explanation/moralizing in general. At first I agreed with the comment about things getting far less interesting after the shooting started, but now I like the fact that these are the "blankest" scenes of all. The acting was generally good for an unprofessional cast (and for the most part this makes sense, since they're doing mundane HS stuff most of the time), but I thought Nathan was really unconvincing in the very last scene. Did this bother anyone else?

Oh, and Banana OTM

it's late.

columbine should not be the site of conflict--it is the idealised america, intergrated, upper middle class, and aspirtational.

the actions of the two shooters are solipistic, mostly macho, and mostly bored---not smart enough to form any proper revoltuion, there desire comes from some sort of metastiszed (sp) adolscent ennui, nothing more and nothing less.

any attempts at analysis or legend making are all non starters
lets take a look at them.

they are not outlaws in the jesse james sense becaue the old west was dead, and anyways there was no money in it.

they are not outlaws in the che guervra sense, because they wanted the cash, they wanted the money.

the whole she said yes phenom, while interesting in a socio political sense, grew out of a nesscity to make meaning from the tragedy--the (voluminous) video tape evidence suggests that this exchange did not happen (nor did the exchange happen where the kebold and company called anyone nigger, or discussed blackness at all--they were good people, nice people and nice people were not racist. )

they also did not fuck, and there socliaszation towards same gender was so close to any other budy in any other town--there was nothing queer here. (which is what van sant does wrong--unless you consider it a mockery of buddy queering/tabloid aesthetics)

they were just two silly boys who didnt want to go to school for another two years, adn decided to go out with a bang. (the interesting thing is that it was so routine--the only intersting thing to come out of the awful moore doc was that bowling anecdote)

(side note QT, when he gave moore the palme d'or--told us that it was intended as a formal choice and not a political one, and there was cynicicsm--why would we distrust the prime formalist of this generation when he gave an award for formalism)

(side note ii--what does it mean that the two largest cultural works that came from this incident had the visual qaulities of commerical agit prop ?)

the vacous, stylish, eye to the camera, televised work of the violence of the surviallence tapes, was v. explicitly reflected in van sants movie.

i remember this movie as actually being more stylistically diverse than most summaries would suggest. there were a few scenes of almost horror-movie-like manipulation through editing/pacing/choreography. this almost seemed to be "baring the device" in that you really notice the constituent components of that form of manipulation when it's placed in the context of an alternative stylistic. i don't specifically remember any overhead long shots that recalled security cameras but i wouldn't doubt that van sant referenced that. i just haven't seen it for a while.

my objections to this film operate sort of at a gut level. the objection that i'm most unsure of is the one that's more "intellectual," that is, concerning van sant's reaping praise for applying an art-house strategy of obfuscation + structural ambiguity + despsychologicalization (or non-psychologicalization) to a famously horrific incident. but i guess a more basic objection, which is harder to justify but feels truer to me, is that he's making a film about real people, who were killed etc., and he's staging their deaths to score these aesthetic points. (i don't get a sense that film is any kind of humanist tribute to these kids, certainly not in its final stretches.) this is where i feel a more conventional film, with more obvious and sincere (even if exaggerated) pathos would be more appropriate. if any film made of a recent tragedy can be deemed appropriate.

ok part of my reaction to this film (the negative one; again, on that other thread i talk a lot about my positive and negative reactions to it) has to do with it being (for me) the most recent in what seemed like a fairly long line of moody art-house films dealing with real tragedies, or alluding to them. count "eureka" and "distance" (two recent japanese films) here, and some american movies i'm blanking on at the moment. all these films seem to apply similar strategies in "dealing" with violent incidents, but i'm not sure any of them arrive at anything more useful or interesting or respectful or anything than the more "sensationalist" or just conventional renderings of such events and their aftermath. maybe i'm just jaundiced. maybe "elephant" really was a revelation in some positive way for lots of people.

what i guess i mean to say is that i'd be no more wary of a jerry bruckheimer 9/11 movie than a gus van sant 9/11 movie.

I originally liked the idea of Elephant being filmed in this particular style so that it reflects how meaningless the event is, as Banana suggested upthread. But actually looking at his previous film Gerry, it was given a very similar treatment (the long takes, pointed lack of explanations/symbols, lack of traditional character development, lots of mundane conversations, time-lapse sky shots w/thunder, etc) despite dealing with very different subject, so I'm not sure if it can even be read that way now. Also from what I've heard, Last Days, which deals with another unconnected topic, shares the same style as well.

So now it's starting to look a lot more opaque to me overall. It's just a purely aesthetic decision then?

I'm curious as hell about "Last Days," which has generated some intelligent ambivalent reactions chronicled in last week's Village Voice.

Some interesting posts above! Vacuous... I can't see how one gets that from this film. That the massacre was "pointless"? Sure. But half the film is spent portraying the meaning in the many lives affected by the massacre. Here are real lives. Here is a pointless massacre. What are we to do? I don't blame Gus for not having an answer; answers haven't seemed to work so well so far. To acknowledge that, and shoot a film which emphasises the chaos inflicted on unassuming teenagers.... I don't think Van Sant provides a judgementless/amoral film. There was a very real sense of judgement in all the isolated walks, which took people towards or away from life or death. The judgement being that evil is pointless, this is of its nature, that it lacks judgement. To kill an individual for no reason but that said individual has a strenuous connection to an offence you have received? That they walked into the library instead of to the gym? Far more chilling than evil committed as direct revenge.

I was so much older then.

Lol, your takes above definitely communicate a more geriatric world view than I know you for

Was confused bc I thought that the future CEO of Kickstarter called me OTM in this thread, but it was actually this one: Come anticipate Elephant with me

Lol, your takes above definitely communicate a more geriatric world view than I know you for

― H.P, Monday, August 12, 2024 10:56 AM

I'm geriatric about texting 'n' driving, that's it.

Watching Van Sant's follow-ups helped me contexualize Elephant.

Did we ever poll "Elephant (2003): Van Sant vs. White Stripes"?

I hope you find moments other than a 19year revive to get that claim to fame out into the world jaymc

Back when this came out I was still too close to my own high school experience where the events of this film were a vivid & present fear, seeing it was such a deeply disturbing experience that I’m not sure I could ever watch it again.

Since then though I’ve seen Clarke’s Elephant & would call it a masterpiece. Van Sant’s is always on my mind when I see it and I think each film benefits from the comparison.

the future CEO of Kickstarter

For a moment I was like "The Pomplamoose guy?" and then realized that's Patreon.

I was in Seattle when I was 23. My friends wanted to go to the Rock Museum and I walked through the front doors and said "this isn't for me" and went off on my own. I explored Seattle and thought it seemed kinda sanitised in an interesting way. I started to really need to pee.

I couldn't find a public washroom, and I couldn't find a café, and I couldn't even find an alley to duck into so I could pee. I was in the middle of some courtyard and there was a pavilion there, and I felt like I was going to start crying, the pee-need was so intense, and then suddenly the clouds opened up, and it was a flash rainstorm, and I was almost immediately drenched to the bone, and I just... peed. Standing there, drenching in rain, silently letting the urine run down my leg into my drenched khaki pants.

I didn't have a cell phone and didn't know what to do. I saw Elephant was playing at a cinema and it was about to start. I went, completely soaked, slightly urinous, and bought a ticket, bought a large Diet Pepsi, and sat down to watch it. It was fantastic. I thought the gay moment was kind of gratuitous and insulting, the same feeling I'd later feel when listening to "John Wayne Gacy Jr." I loved the performances and the long follow-the-leader shots.

Then the massacre started, and I was on the edge of my seat. I had finished my Diet Pepsi. I really needed to pee again. But I wanted to watch the film to the end. I couldn't hold it. I ducked out and ran to the restroom and peed in the urinal. I ran back to the theatre to see... the final shot of the film, a shot of a cloudy sky. I missed the ending.

xp I was mistaken, he wasn't CEO, but he was a cofounder. And a regular ILX poster in the early days.