Movie review
Film addresses shootings
by Brian Abrams, Reporter

   Director Gus Van Sant’s controversial docudrama, Elephant, gives a poignant glance to the school shooting travesties in America.    However, he also finds time to make his own little kiddy porno within it.
   I call it a docudrama not because there is non-fictional footage but because Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) swoops the camera up and down the halls, across the soccer fields and hovers over the cafeteria to give a bleak, realistic effect against the everyday agonies of high school.
   It’s all very moving, the aspect of high school monotony. But it gets even more gut wrenching when two kids massacre everyone of the school grounds.
   Van Sant spends too much time with closeups and visual symbols: broad shoulder with peck popping out of T-shirts or greased back hair that scream “hunk.”
   The shower scene is another problem. The two kids who blow away everyone in the school with their machine guns make out in the shower before school. One of them poses the question “I’ve never kissed anyone before; have you?”
Gimme a break.
   Two-thirds of the way through a very touching story, Van Sant forces his own sexual orientation into the film, suggesting that sexually repressed teenagers who do not receive the right attention for being gay have to slaughter 65 kids. It’s ridiculous.
   So go see Elephant if you want to watch a very touching story that turns into gay exploitation and spoils it all at the very end.