Film review

Hello. I was asked to translate my review/article about a film from Lithuanian to English but I think I really need some help with it. Can someone correct my grammar mistakes? The text is quite long but I hope someone will read it (:

Gus van Sant “Elephant”

School is the brightest and the sharpest reflection of our society. Feelings here are stronger, words are sorer, complexes are bigger. But basically school is like a small but extremely accurate model of a world where bored, disappointed, disillusioned, enthusiastic, rapturous, sad people play happiness and war. Like in a real life.

Gus van Sant film "Elephant" is a record of one single day when two students shot all teachers and students from their school. Trying to ease the distance between the viewer and the screen movie is shot in a documentary style. With help of camera work you always feel like a part of the action, it seems that while keeping the slight distance you are actually observing everyday school life. Same events are shown from different perspectives of different people. By creating a feeling of ambiguity and estimating same actions from different points of view we can get to know contradictory characters. Constant repetitions and long walkings through empty corridors create an atmosphere of meditative but inevitable reconciliation with reality.

Because the final is not hided from a viewer – there is absolutely no doubt that the end will be sad. That's why during the whole film we very carefully watch all actions and movements, that's why we desperately search for a reason or a pretext. However, Gus van Sant doesn't want to analyse motives, describe consequences and, especially, moralise. His aim is to show the birth of hatred and cruelty. And not only here, at this school, in this time - it is a feeling that can be awaken in each and everyone of us, no matter who are we and what is around us.

A teenager is trying to learn Beethoven's “Fur Elise” on the piano. In the middle of the second part his friend enters a room. He says “hello”, takes a laptop and starts to play a computer game. The theme melody comes back. One by one, in a rhythm of the music, computer enemies are being shot. The final part of composition is obviously too difficult for a guy, he is making more and more mistakes. Finally, he bangs the keys, shows a fuck for his piano sheets, takes the computer from his friend and finds a gun on the internet.

This film is not about slaughter, not about streamlets of blood, not even about repulsedteenagers. It is about things that we all do in our everyday life, those useless fights against society and ourselves when we try to explain the unexplainable, to judge the unjudgeble, to kill the unkillable. “Elephant” is about a war in which we all play with real and imaginable guns.