i think i never finished watching this movie. dont you find it weird how van sant is always going from one extreme to the other in his films? like he makes that whole poverty striken genius to darling of academia genre and then he goes and makes something odd and mostly badly received like elephant. there's not much in the middle for him.
yea. but I kind of love that about Van Sant. there was that period with Good will Hunting, To die for and Fiding forrester where it looked like we'd lost him to Hollywood but it's as if he realized himself all of a sudden he didn't want to be part of that so he made this big turn away from it and with his Trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, Last days (which I didn't really care for btw. Gerry and Elephant are much better) he really wanted to distance himself from all that.
a lot of it is experiments as well and with Last Days that experiment, in my opinion, turned kind of sour, but in Gerry and Elephant it's a great success.
he's always had the love for tragic stories in him though...and for wanting to show a different side of society and humanity. that never went away. just stylistically he went through a lot of changes ....