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Of Elephants and Blind Men
April 12, 2004, 4:57 p.m. So, I met Ramona today. She’s one cool chickadee – very witty and good to talk to. She let me drag her into a couple of a clothing stores and listened to me babble, so we’re going to do it again sometime. And when she’s legal, we’re going to go out to pubs and see bands together. We bought crappy $2 silver wedding rings for each other, too. I wonder if I could get it engraved . . . Anyway. So we went to see Elephant, which was one weird arse movie. The basic plot is that it’s one day in a school where a Columbine-style shooting occurs, and we following the narrative threads of all these different students. It’s done documentary style, and there are heaps of tracking shots – I swear, I spent at least half of the movie looking at the back of someone’s head – but I think the purpose of them was so you could see what was going on in the edges of the narratives of each student as they walked through the school. When The Movie Show reviewed it, they said one of its problems was that it didn’t really give a reason as to why the two shooters couldn’t see these people as anything but targets – but, can you really ever say why? Can you pin down why someone feels the need to go shoot up a school? Maybe, if it was done in a more ‘fictional’ style, you could expect the film to give you a reason, but this was done documentary style, like it was trying to capture ‘life’. And life doesn’t have neat little endings. Many things were left unexplained. Some characters you met in the final ten minutes of their lives, and you were left thinking, well, what was the point of that? Perhaps the question the whole film poses to us is, well, what’s the point of anything? And maddeningly refuses to give any semblance of an answer : ) Tithonus said that (the equally elusive and enignmatic) Lost in Translation was basically a filmed poem, and I think I’d have to title Elephant the same. It is . . . it’s a bit like an Impressionist painting, like a frame placed around life arbitrarily. Of course not completely arbitrarily, as it does focus on a life-changing event, but the people it chooses to speak about appear to be chosen at random. It’s bizarre, and disconnected, but it’s beautiful and melancholy. I liked it.
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