Elephant

There's a right way to make a movie that's nothing but people walking, and a wrong way. This is closer to the right way than "Gerry." The acting isn't great, and the dialogue tries to be allusive, but ends up being forced and stilted. The sound is good, though, when it shows the dialogue of other people getting into the characters' heads.

But, as the film's title suggests, there's an elephant in the room that should be discussed. As Marilyn Manson said after Columbine, "don't expect the end of the world to come one day out of the blue -- it's been happening every day for a long time." For Bill Maher's 2007 list of "Dickheads of the Year," one of his picks was "The Asshole Who Shot Up Virginia Tech." He said, "I've forgotten his name — which is as it should be!" The movie doesn't give an answer for school shootings, but I'm not sure it hints at anything either, other than the obvious -- bad parents, picked on, easy access to guns. But as the movie also shows, other kids have bad parents and deal with bullies, and they don't kill people. Maybe Maher's right; maybe they're just assholes.