SmartRavi

Before Sunset is an oddity, a sequel to the one-night-in-Vienna romance of 1994's Before Sunrise. This time the pair reunites 10 yrs later in Paris and 98% of the movie's length is one unbroken conversation between the two. Sadly Julie Delpy ain't quite as beautiful while it seems Ethan Hawke has caught a nasty case of the Hivees. She's an environmental activist and still single he's married and is oh merely a best-selling novelist on a publicity tour promoting his book based on the one night these two spent together in the first flick. So it all gets very self-reflexive real quick, and annoying and not hot. She says that she's romantically numb and he describes his married life as running a nursery with a woman he used to date and has had sex < 10 times in 4 years. They don't kiss or make any promise to meet again and it's all ambiguous and noncommittal and forgettable. The screenplay was co-written by the two stars and a lot of the dialogue is humorless and chilly. I'm pretty annoyed by the whole thing and I think I've loved every other movie directed by my man Linklater, from School of Rock to Dazed & Confused to Waking Life to Slacker. This one I can live without. Mitigating factor: Delpy's awesome apartment, revealed in the last 10 minutes.

Elephant is indie anomie gone horribly wrong, more fartsy than artsy in its depiction of what should been a lovely high-school murder massacre, only with all character development, cinematic violence, and ominous foreboding stripped clean, leaving such stretches of great tedium that its puny 81 minute length seemed twice as long. Director Gus Van Sant inexplicably takes up I'm estimating at least half the movie's length in endless shots of the back of students' heads as they trot thru the nearly-empty hallways of their school. (A 5 minute shot of one of the "good kids" from behind wearing, symbolism alert, a sweatshirt with "Lifeguard" on its back, then panning up to show only the Red Cross logo above this as he ascends a celestially lit stairway, is maybe the most laughably awful of all such shots). The two murderers possess all expected qualities of your teen sociopath, picked-on, possibly gay, violent video game playing, gun-obsessed, piano-lesson-taking, and neglected by unseen parents. But the effortlessness of these and all other characters, played by a crew on nonprofessional actors, (excepting Tim Bottoms of all people) calls into question any insights we may hope to glean from this beyond-minimalist nonsense. And Jesus, is the climactic shootout ever disappointing.

Van Sant usually fills his movies with decent music but not here, instead we get "Fur Elise" played accurately but passionless by one of the killers; this may be the movie's single most boring scene, but there is lots of competition for this superlative. I'm sure Van Sant loved casting this thing, filling it with the ultra-femmy young pretty boys he's always been partial to, from Private Idaho to Drugstore Cowboy to Good Will Hunting to that embarrassment Finding Forrester. This is by far his worst film I've seen, (though Gerry is supposed to be all kinds of terrible too), and memorably bad on nearly all counts. Avoid.

I give it a D minus minus minus minus minus, only avoiding an F because I thought Lifeguard's girlfriend was way hot.

Marvelous amalgam of ambient sound, pithy dialogue (occasionally betrayed by poor subtitling), craggy faces, craggier landscapes, and an unerring sense of concise communication. The comparison to Wenders is apt, particularly something like Kings of the Road. Only this is much less about the art of film and much more real. I feel that I'm failing to explain what makes this film so remarkable, because it is more than the great photography, editing, and acting. Truly memorable.