Elephant

2003 "An ordinary high school day. Except that it's not."
7.1| 1h21m| R| en| More Info
Released: 24 October 2003 Released
Producted By: Fine Line Features
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

Several ordinary high school students go through their daily routine as two others prepare for something more malevolent.

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Reviews

YouHeart I gave it a 7.5 out of 10
ScoobyMint Disappointment for a huge fan!
Whitech It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.
Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.
adbeer-47919 "Elephant" is basically a film made for testing how to use the camera. It has a very shallow plot and the main psychopaths in the film don't have an obvious reason to shoot up the school at the end. Although it is very very well made in filming. It has a LOT of long shots in the film that were very impressive to look at and the cinematography was a lot like how "Son of Saul" filmed like. He always found a way to make the shot interesting instead of typical. Looking back on the film I think that if the film was filmed and presented typically then the film would be pretty bad. Another defining quality of the film was of course the soundtrack. One of the psychopaths plays and listens to Beethoven. (Sounds familiar?) Anyways there was one scene where a character was walking casually in the school hallway and "Moonlight Sonata" was playing in the background and the scene was never really that dull or boring. I mean c'mon who doesn't feel relaxed listening to Beethoven. The film has three segments to it in my opinion. the first is filming the normal and casual lives of a bunch of teenagers in a high school which was somewhat captivating. The next is that one scene happens and lots of people are in that scene and it then tells the perspective of what happens until the shooting for each character. And lastly for the last 20 minutes is the shooting of the school. Which was pretty shocking for the way it was filmed. There were flaws though. The acting was pretty bad especially when people died in the end. There was literally one guy who was walking down the hall almost kind of casually, and he walks behind one of the psychos and of course he gets shot. The blond haired kid saw the psychos going into the school and tried to tell people but the way he reacted was like it didn't matter that much. There isn't really any development of the characters or the story at all. It was like they were just there because ultimately it is a film to experiment with what a camera can do.
bandw This is a fictionalization of the Columbine High School massacre that happened in 1999. The story plods along until the climax of the shootings. When I say plods, I mean plods. Eschewing any attempt at depth, much of what is shown are long takes of kids walking down hallways or across fields. I figured that there would ultimately be some payoff in the story for the tedium of the walks, but no. The tedious waking turns out to be a way to make the movie have feature length. If all of the walking were to be taken out, then what would be left would be much less than sixty minutes.Establishing any motivation for the actions of the two killers is minimal--one of the guys is seen to be a loner and is bullied in one scene. The interests of the guys are: watching Nazi films, playing violent video games, ordering a semi-automatic gun. There is an ambiguous scene that has the two guys naked in a shower kissing. Is that meant to implicate homosexuality as somehow part of the personality of some such killers?In a pivotal scene, one of the shooters confronts the school principal who pleads for his life. The kid says to him that maybe he (the principal) will take complaints more seriously in the future, but then the kid kills him. What kind of complaints was the kid referring to? Would responses to student complaints actually have made a difference? At least not what we see here, which is more of telling of what happens, but not why. Perhaps there will never be a satisfactory answer to why, but, maybe movies like this are part of the answer as to what might be a precipitating cause of some of the events depicted.There is nothing here beyond what most people could imagine. The main reason I can see for the existence of this movie is to exploit the less than admirable human trait of being unable to avoid looking at an accident.
Jackson Booth-Millard Directed by Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting, Milk), and produced by Diane Keaton, I had heard the title of this film probably once in the past, and with it featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die I was always going to watch. The title is a tribute to the BBC drama of the same name directed by Alan Clarke, and refers to the phrase "elephant in the room" (the collective denial of some obvious problem), not what Van Sant originally assumed was based on the parable of the blind men and elephant (several blind men trying describe an elephant from parts of its body touched). Basically the film take place in a suburb of Portland in a high school, it is simply an ordinary day in the lives of a group of several average teenage students going through their daily routines. Specifically focused are high school students and close friends Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen), they are seemingly ordinary and a part of the fabric of the high school and its array of student actions, in fact it's hard to distinguish them. Alex plays classical piano and Eric plays video games, they calmly watch Nazi programmes on television, and have purchased firearms over the Internet, appearing ordinary and interesting as any of the others students, they are actually drawing up plans for a merciless killing spree. They seem to have enough ammunition and bombs to last the last of the afternoon, they simply walk through the corridors and classrooms killing several of their school peers, and there is no rescue from the authorities or emergency services. Also starring John Robinson as John McFarland, Elias McConnell as Elias, Jordan Taylor as Jordan, Carrie Finklea as Carrie, Nicole George as Nicole, Brittany Mountain as Brittany, Alicia Miles as Acadia, Kristen Hicks as Michelle, Timothy Bottoms as Mr. McFarland and Matt Malloy as Mr. Luce. The cast of characters are real students using their actual names, all conversations are improvised, the elaborate plan by the two antagonists to kill everyone in the high school is the most memorable scene of the entire film, the senseless massacre is a near mimic of the Columbine high school massacre, and the ending of the film has no resolution, so there are questions unanswered and it all experimental, but that is the point, so all in all it does make for an entertaining drama. Worth watching!
Chihiro Elephant, is a movie that introduce us to some high school students. We can see an ordinary routine school day through some of the students point. Two of them have something different in their mind! So, they have a plan to make this usual day unusual.There's so much hate for this movie and I get it. It's an very slow movie, but it's worth watching, especially if you like art. Directing is great, very beautiful scenes. Camera work is wonderful, long scene shots made me feel like I was not watching the movie, I was in the movie and I'm walking around like I was invisible.I wasn't satisfied with dialogue though. Some bad dialogs, It would have been better to have some deeper dialogs. Also, acting wasn't good enough. I got this feeling that even the couple there had some distance. Even when the talk to each other, they don't feel as comfortable as couples are.Overall, I liked this movie, it was very artistic with great camera work.