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2:37. Where to start? I suppose we will start with the plot. The film centers around the lives of several high school students filled with problems. On one rather eventful day, a suicide shakes up the school. Melody, a victim of incest rape is shocked to find out that she is pregnant. Steven has several million medical issues which include 2 urethra's and a limp. Then we have the happy couple Sean and Sarah. Oh and also Sean is in a gay relationship with the drug addict Luke, and Sarah's bulemic. Let's see there also Marcus who raped hi sister, Melody, and then there's Julie and Kelly, two charachters on the outskirts with no real issues. Despite the fact that Kelly had collectively 2 lines in the film and was featured in possibly 3 scenes (at the most) she is in fact the one who kills herself at the end, the plot to which the whole movie revolves around. Her reason was "because everyone else had problems but didn't pay attention to hers". Well when all your friends have 2 penises, are being incestiously raped, are a closested gay, are bulemic, and all of these things just so happen to be surfaced on the same day...well your issues might just be overshadowed. Plus the fact that her "issues" were never really explained to us.

I had several major issues with this film. The first is how god damn pretencious it is. All the charachters to which we are made to believe are "the bad guys" have no redeeming qualities to them, they are, in fact, horrible people and should just be viewed as evil. And "the good guys" are just that. Perfect angels misunderstood by the world. They have absolutley nothing wrong with them, they are sweet as pie and have many horrible issues which I suppose we are suppose to feel guilty for. I have no problem with a charachter that is just a bad person, but atleast make them human. Not just "evil", nobody is that way. Also the charachter Steven. He has so many issues to where it's just unbelievable. He has dreams of becoming a soccer player but has a limp, so that excludes him from ever becoming one? I'm not quite sure.

Another issue is the fact that there are dozens of "interviews" talking to what is apparently about the suicide of Kelly, although they seem to love to talk about themselves. The interviews are a minor issue though because the best acting in the film takes place during these scenes, especially with Melody. This brings us to the last major issue I have with the film. Kelly's suicide. Now I do like the message about everyone elses problems overshadowing her's to where nobody pays attention to her. That I can understand, what I can't understand is to why she couldn't have been a major charachter. It was completley unbelievable when she killed herelf because I honestly forgot she was even in the movie!

Those are the issues with the film itself. I mainly have a HUGE issue with the director. His cocky arrogance towards his work is just bizarre. In commentary he has nothing but praise. Everything's perfect according to him, he messed up nowhere. Apparently he was too far up his own ass to notice his film is almost an exact replica of Gus van Sant's 2003 film about a school shooting, Elephant. Elephant won the Palme D'or at Cannes on 2003 because of it's innovative approach to filmmaking, using long tracking shots of charachter's interacting, followed by slow motion and classical music. Well yeah, same exact thing here. And he doesn't even admit that Elephant was influenced by it. It boggles my mind how self obsorbed he is that he can't even admit that he was inspired, beter yet copying Elephant.

On the plus side, the cinematography was excelent, mainly because it worked so well in Elephant, but it was effective none-the-less. The acting was also very good. As I mentioned earlier, Melody (played by Teresa Palmer) was particularly good at her role. The overall plot of the girl who's issues were overshadowed by other's self indulgence was also a very intresting element to the film, but ultimatley it just didn't work.

I'm giving this film

out of 5 stars. Advice for the director - for your next film, get your head out of your own ass and know that not everything you do is perfect.