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Oedipax wrote:I suppose you could say something similar for Elephant, but who ever thought school shootings were a good idea outside of the people committing them? What is the film actually doing? I get the formal inspiration from Clarke, and formally speaking Elephant is a marvel, I'm just less certain now of what it's trying to do beyond the aesthetic element. It's a beautiful film about a horrible thing.

That's kind of the point, isn't it? We essentially fetishize these events, so he presents this almost arcadian, universal beautiful film that equates something so disastrous as a school shooting with something so common as a coming-of-age story. It's like a film about the idealized version of the event that became the media go-to afterwards - hypnotic, beguiling, desirable.

This is super frustrating because van Sant's attempt to place Gerry into a narrative is actually super great and would have made his best film since at least Paranoid Park had it not saddled itself with some of the worst flashbacks I have ever seen. Each one's reason for being amounts to an image. Reducing them to a second or two, twenty at the most, is literally all that's needed to make this film great. Have a scene just be the bloody tea bag or limiting the CAT scan to that first image as it travels back to the mountain. We really don't need to figure out how McConaughey found out about the mountain with a magic Google search and the monologue about 70 minutes in renders all of Watts' scenes redundant. Basically the film could have used a lot more ambiguity and should have played closer to the Gerry manual.

Even with these major flaws though the film is significantly better than Restless and honestly a lot of well respected films (I know I'll rewatch this sooner than the thematically related Tropical Malady.

Liked this a lot; found it very moving and far better than its miserable rep. I guess it's kind of an infamous film by this point, one perceived as a total failure. This is deeply unfortunate as overall it's daring and generally quite successful, albeit not perfect. There is stuff here that doesn't work but it doesn't tank the film for me at all. Some of the scenes, especially early on, between McConaughey and Watts are underwritten and tepid stock melodrama that need to be better than they are, richer and more developed. And the Big Surprise that happens to the Watts' character sits poorly with me, seems ill conceived, though I think I understand what they were going for and trying to do. The ending, meanwhile, that everyone seems to hate and find so ultra-risible worked exceptionally well for me and was handled with the grace and finesse which accompanies so much of the rest of the picture. Also, that particular reveal is well established with details throughout so it doesn't just come out of nowhere as some kind of trite spiritual kitsch. Actually, it's tied in to what makes the film so special and, I suspect, problematic for a lot of critics.

It's a film that takes its melodrama very seriously, which is unique enough these days, but the film is also heavily symbolic. That's how the melodrama is expressed and symbolism as extensive as this is virtually anathema with or without the melodrama which is equally anathema to many. So, just to make a film with this sort of orientation was a challenge and a daring provocation. As I said, it's not entirely a success but it's a hell of an admirable effort. There's a very strong, affecting scene midway through between McConaughey and Watanabe that illustrates much of what I'm talking about here in capsule form (though the scene is actually a rather astonishing and impressive ten minutes long). It plays like a grown up version of the campfire scene in My Own Private Idaho, with all the inexpressible longings replaced by well articulated but painfully expressed regrets.

I actually agree fully. On first sitting I wasn't sure about how I felt about the last twenty minutes which feel summed up by merely flashing back to the coffin, but at the same time making it explicit in that way seems thematically appropriate as well. I'll probably need a few days to work out the film, but I think I'll wind up liking it a lot once things settle.