Elephant
Gus Van Sant is up to some weird shit yo. Somehow, by practically vanishing as an auteur in any measurable sense, he delivered a bafflingly original film with Elephant. He was lost there for a while. Was he a Matt Damon team player (Good Will, Gerry), or maybe a poor-kid-with-brains feelgood storyteller (Good Will, You the Man Now Dog)? And then he vanishes behind a cloud of Hitchcock (Psycho rebake) never to appear again. I hear Gerry was good. Psycho is still a mystery to me, as is – to some extent – Elephant. (I’m hoping someone makes a school shooting film set in Middle Earth, “Oliphaunt”.) There doesn’t seem much point in analyzing it, it’s just there – it’s all surface, no depth. In a good way.
I don’t know if a remake can be bafflingly original unless the beginning or the middle or the end, or the over-all sensibility is somehow radically altered. From the little I’ve read, this film is closer to a Psycho-type painting-by-numbers than a return to My Own Private Idaho-form.
Feels like kind of a joke that it won best picture at Cannes.
Augh! I had no idea. RIP Gus van Sant’s auteur status.
It’s great that van Sant and his always-suspect reputation’s crumbling coincides with a potential windfall for the overly-neglected reputation of the late Alan Clarke. Three of his films are available for rent here in TO at the usual places and all three are incredible. Gary Oldman’s Volvo-hooligan squad in The Firm is the best of the bunch however.