Word: sante
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...juicy Oscar bait. One of my most cherished films, The Manchurian Candidate, is being remade with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep on board. Though remakes of classic films are only occasionally successful, this pedigree will guarantee at least a vastly entertaining mess (I can hear those Gus Van Sant Psycho violins...
...Elephant, director Gus Van Sant depicts what most Americans only imagined in the days after the Columbine High School killings of April 1999: that same violence transported to their own local high school...
...staging the tragedy at a fictional high school in his own city of Portland, Ore., Van Sant avoids this type of oversimplification, making what is surely one of the most thoughtful and inquisitive films of the year. Focusing on twelve students on the day of the shooting, Elephant patiently explores the pressures and indignities of being a high school student. The film renders its characters with unusual accuracy, commiserating with one student about the dress code for gym class and sharing the impatience of several juniors waiting for the day when they can go off-campus for lunch...
Despite the audience’s foreknowledge of the eventual attack, the violence is no less startling when it arrives. In contrast to the majority of action movies, which present killings and bloodshed as something to be anxiously anticipated, Van Sant creates a tangible dread and a sense of impending loss. The violence is shown vividly where it cannot be avoided, but Van Sant is admirably selective and restrained in what he shows. The murders are never glorified, and each death elicits in the viewer the sadness and anger it deserves. Even the killers realize that this...
...proverbial elephant that becomes invisible after people grow accustomed to its presence, the implication being that the cause of the Columbine should be as obvious as an elephant in someone’s living. As a title for this movie, however, it’s a misnomer. Van Sant respects his audience and subject too much to suggest a single cause for the Columbine killings, and the film is a beautifully nuanced exploration of some of those causes. It is a tribute to Elephant and its director that the viewer emerges, shaken, almost as bewildered as most Americans were...