Have just come home from seeing Elephant. It was, like... really... really... really... really good. Very understated and gentle and quiet and captivating and tender. And the characters were so natural and just, like, existed. Reviewers have called it shallow, but I disagree. Mainly because, well, people don't generally go around expressing their deep interiority in usual life. Rather, any such interiority mostly remains almost imperceptible in our social interactions. We only ever get glimpses of other people's internal stuff, and the film nails that. And I found that quite deep. It's exactly the right perspective, especially for us as viewers, as we just follow all the kids around and watch. From the very first few minutes, I knew this film was something special. The first scene, with the kid and his drunk dad driving to school. The behaviour is spot on. People, you just have to see that scene! It is so fine. Timothy Bottoms is the fucking deal as the dad. My god! His work in That's My Bush was great, but this is just superb. And that kid, man. All the kids. Are so, just, like...there. This movie is totally fucking beautiful.

Anyway, even though the film is like, exemplary in its presentation of behaviour, that's not the only subject matter here. There is, of course, a high-school massacre to contend with. The threat of it is just at the edges of every frame. The slow moving camera makes you only too aware of what you can't see, and how you won't be fast enough to avoid it. This is how it played to my mind, anyway. All those long, slow engrossing scenes of just following behind a walking student, leave you kinda half in the gently unfolding screen moments, and half in the increasingly tense audience. Also, I think it makes sense not to have the killers exposit an answer as to why they are going to do what they are going to do. It is more fitting that we just watch them do it. I think that provides insight. For me, it was about him/them feeling something, and then deciding that some kind of course of action would remedy that feeling. So he made a decision as to what that course of action would be. And the fact of having made that one decision, installed in it the value of correctness. It was like, on a whim they happened on a plan. The plan existed. So everything that followed on from it just HAD to be done. Without reflection or an interrogation of the initial motivation to have a plan. I think. This is the mental process that I found in the boys, anyway.

For me, the film showed that their mentality wasn't;
"We're going to kill people at school."
"Why?"

Rather, it was;
"We're going to kill people at school."
"Okay. We're going to kill people at school."

It was sort of like a 'why not let's try it?' vibe. Like, ANY idea would have presented as a viable option to them, and this was the one they got a grasp of. And I think that's BIG. And true. And unexplainable - I mean, why this idea? And still more true. Really, I found it to be an excellent film. Quality.