If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get my blog updates by email. Thanks for visiting!

Director: Gus Van Sant

Cast: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell, Jordan Taylor, Carrie Finklea

Runtime: 81mins

A disturbing slow paced film which will leave you shocked and speechless. A cinematic gem of a masterpiece which earned itself the prestigious Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at Cannes in 2003. And above all, a Gus Van Sant film.

The film starts by exploring the mind of a teenage student and follows many students in a day at their High School before a school shooting. Each character is followed in the film and is an average student you would find at a high school. The movie seems extremely real as though this is your local high school and these are the students that attend the school.

The movie ends in a very sudden manner where one of the shooters goes about choosing who to shoot first. A very powerful and unpleasant journey through the eyes of the different school students. There is no background music at all, so most scenes are very silent and creepy. Some scenes were dragged on to make us think on what might happen to that particular character. The film was marketed as a school shooting film and thus had lots of controversy around it but I think its something more than that.

Almost every character was acting in his or her first film and all of them did a good job. I don’t think i have to mention anything about the direction or the cinematography because i think those 2 departments won the golden palm for the film. As I mentioned in Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant’s movies always finds its audience.