Elephant*** One of the great things about slow movies is that while the scenes unfold slowly, the audience start to gather their personal thoughts about the theme and slowly get involved deeper and deeper into the movie. This is one such movie, where you will not see any story at all. It just shows one day in a school that ends in a shootout. We are shown bits and pieces of various characters before the incident, but we are not allowed to know more about them. The beautiful part is that many scenes are shot in multiple angles and we get to see a different perspective as the character changes, sometimes meeting at the same point where we left with the previous character. The camera moves painfully slowly or is static to the point that the action happens outside the frame often. The music is great, especially when one of the shooter plays the piano. I am not sure if it is a popular piece of music, can anybody comment? This is a slow, but high quality movie. If you are not very particular about story/plot, you might like it.
What was incredible about ELEPHANT was the fact that its a pastiche of high school personalities. There is a story, but the plot isn't the focus of the film at all, but instead a device to allow us to glimpse a voyeur sight of these people, without any bullshit expositional dialogue or whatever nonsense that unsecure directors would have to make us CLEARLY understand.
