Don't let the title fool you. The movie doesn't have elephant in it, but it has a deep meaning to it that will make your feel like mash after thinking about it to long.

The story is about high school violence that unfolds on an ordinary school day, inside an American high school, filled with schoolwork, football, gossip and socializing. For each of the students we meet, high school is a different experience: stimulating, friendly, traumatic, lonely, hard.

'Elephant' is loosely based on the school shooting in 1999 known as "Columbine High School Massacre", with the shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. When I say loosely I really do mean loosely, because this isn't base on a true story bullsh't…

0/100

My hatred for this film randomly came up in the comments of a documentary about Pope Francis, and rather than address it there I'll just add the review I wrote (for Time Out New York) here. Though I apparently didn't get much space for it, so it doesn't really capture my loathing very well. A bit more helpful is something I posted from Cannes to a cinephile chat group (before anyone who wasn't at the fest had seen the film, obviously), which I'll also append below.

IMPORTANT: I engaged in numerous arguments about this film in 2003 and have heard the case for the defense from the best and brightest. No desire to relitigate it in the comments here.…

This wasn’t a film, this was more of an experience. I don’t think I ever saw anything similar to this film.
To be honest, this wasn’t a groundbreaking film in many aspects (the script was bland and the acting was very questionable), but Gus Van Sant’s vision was genius. This film is definitely not for everyone because there’s not much happening in it. And the film chooses to spend most of its time just following its characters. That way Gus Van Sant didn’t give his characters a characterization or personality, he gave them the importance and a place in his world. He was telling us that those characters are just people who happened to be at that place at that…