I saw ‘Elephant’ last night. It was, in a word, pretty horrible. I normally like Gus Van Zant, despite the fact that his movies tend to have a certain artsy arrogance to them that normally I can’t stand. I really don’t know what movie these people watched.

One of the ballsy decisions that Gus makes is to use real high school students instead of professional actors. In a result that can only be described as utterly shocking, it turns out that average high school students can’t act.

The real disappointment of the film is his treatment of the rationale of the boys who snap. The boys who snap are shown to be truly random, with few indicators. It turns out that they had relatively happy childhoods. They were interested in but not obsessed with Nazi history.There are hints the two protagonists are attracted to each other, but there is oddly no angst, no true pain, and no moment of truth where one convinces the other this is what to do.

The lack of the sense of pain and isolation that reports tell us surrounded the real Columbine killers is really what bugged me. School shootings are not utterly random events, but are rather results of the picked on and marginalized attempting to, at least for a short time, gather a sense of power. Bullying is probably the real cause of events like Columbine. The movie, instead, shows an event that seems mutually decided as easily as which toppings to order on a pizza, with no real thought to the ramifications other than ‘it’ll be cool’.

Of course, the boys enjoy playing FPSes. The FPS shown in the game is so bad and ugly that it makes Meridian 59 look like Doom 3 – when you shot someone in the game, they simply TURNED THE MODEL UPSIDE DOWN and buried it’s head in the dirt to show it was dead. Clearly no game company wanted to show a real product in this movie, so Gus and co. were forced to make their own. For humor value, it’s almost worth watching the movie to fast forward to the clip of the game that supposedly helped push these kids over the edge. On the other hand, I suppose if my mom would only buy me video games that looked like Castle Wolfenstein with stick figures, I might snap too.