Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Van Sant's Elephants, 26 Dec 2007
Elephant is an interesting film that mixes the trivialities of high school life with the terror of an unexplainable, unsypathetic evil. Van Sant uses Beethovens Moonlight sonata to great effect creating a serene and haunting atmosphere as the camera floats around the school following the unknowing students. It is a film that intends to shock and often does as Van Sant uses a technique of luring his audience into a false sense of security only to cruely snap it away.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Realist cinema at its best, 29 Mar 2005
Understated, elegant and serene, yet at the same time bold, powerful and haunting, Gus Van Sant's 'Elephant' is a superb piece of ultra-realist filmmaking. Taking the documentary-style legacy of 'Kids' to new levels, 'Elephant' is more of a work of art than entertaiment.The quality of the film lies in the fact that it appreciates the power of subtlety to create a truly disturbing atmosphere which lodges itself in your mind and refuses to leave. At once realistic and yet strangely dreamlike, the camera follows a number of American students around a school, documenting the way their paths interject and recapturing the same events through different viewpoints. It is the ordinary, mundane existences of these characters which the film is trying to capture; Gus Van Sant is trying to show us what it is that is lost when people are indiscriminantly murdered. The fact that the audience is well aware of how the film is going to end only adds to this strangely real yet dreamlike quality, as does the haunting 'Moonlight Sonata' which accompanies much of the movement, and the violence, when it does come, is filmed in such a silent, almost logical way that it only serves as an extension of this mood. 'Elephant' is a snapshot of a moment in its character's lives in which time stands still and the ordinary becomes the unbelievable. If you want an entertaining, escapist experience then this isn't for you; if, on the other hand, you want an artistic, subtle and haunting cinematic experience, 'Elephant' will fulfill.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Exremely Good - not for everyone, 11 April 2006
By A Customer
Reading the reviewers of Van Sant's Elephant, you get the feeling that there is a very definite split between the audience. People either love it or hate it - there doesn't seem to be any grey area. Unfortunately (or furtunately, depending on how you choose to look at it), this is probably the best way to describe challenging and ambitious art cinema - doesn't this rule generally apply to most avant guarde films that are considered the best of their time?
It's true Elephant is long, and nothing happens for about an hour, you do merely follow students around the corridors of a school, and yes the killers are surprisingly cliche. And these are the elements that people will base the fact of loving or hating the film.
One of the major problems of a film like this and the subject that it is tackling is that it will gain a large recognition. And because of this it will be given more of a mainstream audience than it probably would have done otherwise. This is not a bad thing, but it does mean that a large number of people going to see a film like this that is tackling a hot topic of the day will be unprepared for the unconventional, voyeuristic piece of art filmmaking that will unravel. Film students, and people well conversed in filmic conventions and styles will, more often than not, love it as it subverts and offers new conventions. But to an audience that is more accustomed to watching 'normal' films, it will strike a barron and boring chord.
So does this mean that the film is boring and pointless? No of course not, and it is also not a film that is merely preaching to the converted, as even that has much to teach and bring to filmmaking and so is definetly not futile. In the end the film is what it is, the audience will get out of it what they bring, and probably the ones that find it boring are the ones that are more used to having narrative set up in the standard way.
Obviously, I found the film to be extremeley rewarding and I got a lot out of it, but then I've done a film studies course and am going into filmmaking. I thought the first hour was very clever and needed the slow uneventful burn, you needed to know that these were real, normal people, you neeeded to become accustomed to them. The killing needed to be numbing senseless and real.
The prblem with films like this and others like Monsters Ball is that they reach the wrong audience, one that cannot deal with real emotion and reality as they have been raised on hollywood films that subvert reality - which is fine, but makes it very hard for them to deal with anything but, it also has a very narrowing effect on film culture.
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