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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I just saw Elephant. ow ow ow. If you are feeling too chipper, this'll deflate the mood in no time. I like it a lot, though, as a document and a marker in time. I like that it is so clearly Columbine, but at the same time clearly fiction. This ain't no mock-u-mentary, but rather knock-down, drag 'em out, expressionistic narrative. The first part of the film, before the shooting started, hit me hard with all the bad, remembered pain and hopelessness of high school. By the time the violence kicked in I was tear-streaked and numb. My own indifference to the bloodshed was in itself the most bleak and, I think (hope), informative part of the experience. I felt similarly about Larry Clark's Kids: painful to sit through but important to see. Now, 9 years later, I am sick of Larry Clark and his self-indulgent, self-serving fetishization of adolescence. And I have felt similarly about Gus Van Sant in the past. But maybe it takes a salacious point of view to provide otherwise clear-eyed, judgement-free pictures of the dark interior of teenager-dom.
Bowling for Columbine is the only place where I've seen a direct connection made between the amorality of youth (which we distance our selves from) to the amorality of the military industrial complex (in which, as adults, we are complicit). While Elephant, is paralysing and despair-inducing, Bowling for Columbine, is a call to action. I'd suggest seeing both.
All that said, here's a good angry rant by Michael Niederman, who hated Elephant and does a very nice job of saying why .