Check your pretentiousness at the door.

So later today I have a night class which I have begun to regret taking. It's English: Reading in Popular Culture, sounds awesome right? That's exactly what I thought but this class is the prime example of how a professor can totally ruin a class. The prof is John Leblanc and I feel bad saying anything bad about the guy because he is a really nice guy, its just he is super pretentious when it comes to music, tv, movies, or anything related to the media. So far in the class we've listened to a bunch of music, and we've watched clips from tv shows and movies, which he always ruins the endings to. So even if I had a remote interest in whatever we were watching he spoils it by giving away the major twist. The first movie we were assigned to watch in full was a movie called Elephant, ever heard of it? Yeah didn't think so. This is my first problem with this class, it isn't pop-culture. We should be looking at popular music, tv, and movies, yet he almost always picks really obscure "artsy" texts (he calls everything we look at texts by the way, told you he was pretentious).

Elephant is one of these "artsy" texts that he seems to think is really well done. Spoiler alert, it isn't. The plot to this movie is based on the Columbine shootings and it tries so hard to be different and interesting, but it fails in almost every way. Anything interesting at all is overshadowed by poor movie-making and atrocious acting. 90% of the scenes in this movie feature the backs of high school students walking throughout the halls not doing anything interesting. This movie is only 80 minutes long but somehow over half of it seems like it's just filler. The other major problem with this movie is the acting. All the actors are incredibly wooden throughout the movie. Everything about it feels so contrived, while watching it I could just see the script being read, that's not a good thing by the way. Now I could forgive the terrible acting if this movie had anything interesting to say. You might think that this is a social commentary, but what is the comment? That kids with guns are bad? That bullying is wrong? That the school system is flawed? Everything this movie tried to say has already been said a hundred times in much better ways.

This is how I feel about pretentious movies like Elephant, they think because they're "artsy" they can break the rules of film. Like the rule that states your movie shouldn't be just a bunch of kids walking around doing nothing for an hour. The fact is that when you break the rules you're left with a boring, silly movie that is condemned to be taught by pretentious professors who think they know what a good movie is.