Elephant is a tough animal to like. Gus Van Sant’s low-key, highly personal response to the 1999 Columbine shootings won the coveted Palm d’Or and Best Director awards at Cannes this year, but it was also booed. That such a coolly dispassionate film would inspire such a passionate response is proof of its power to get under our skin. But whether Van Sant’s second return (following Gerry) to his indie roots works artistically is open to debate.

Working from an outline rather than a script (though he is credited as writer), and using nonprofessional actors (many referred to by their real first names) who were encouraged to improvise, Van Sant follows a handful of students as they go about a “typical” day in an unnamed high school (actually a decommissioned school in Portland, Oregon, Van Sant’s home town). Some are geeks and “losers,” others are popular and pretty (including the boys). But none of them are immune to the unimaginable violence that explodes when two alienated peers show up with automatic weapons and start shooting, their assault planned as carefully as a bank robbery.

Van Sant tells his story in a semi-documentary style, utilizing long tracking shots and filming some scenes from multiple points of view, which gives the film a striking, you-are-there immediacy. The kids are amazingly good, and I appreciated that Van Sant doesn’t offer pat explanations for the shooters’ motivations (everyone will surely have their own theory). But hypnotic though it may be in places, overall the film doesn’t seem terribly original, leaning so heavily on real-life events as it does. It’s also missing something: a last act. Strangely, Van Sant ends the film in the middle of the shooting spree, leaving our mouths agape — not with wonder but bewilderment. He’s made a provocative, nicely detailed movie, but it feels curiously unfinished. Elephant growls when it should roar. (Hillcrest Cinemas)

“It’s scary how bad the writing is,” says Jamie (Colin Firth) ever so self-deprecatingly about his novel in progress. Or was he referring to Love Actually, mega-successful screenwriter Richard Curtis’ (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary — all starring Hugh Grant) directorial debut?

It’s five weeks before Christmas, and, to quote the Troggs’ classic Top 40 hit, “Love Is All Around,” on Downing Street, the dapper new Prime Minister (Hugh Grant again) is exchanging glances with his bouncy personal assistant, Natalie (Martene McCutcheon). Daniel’s (Liam Neeson) precocious 11-year-old stepson (Thomas Sangster) is smitten with a female classmate. Sarah (a prim Laura Linney) is pining away for her gorgeous co-worker, Karl (Rodrigo Santoro). Jamie (Firth) is slowly falling for his Portuguese housekeeper (Lucia Moniz), who can’t speak English. And so on and so forth. Ad nauseum.

If Love Actually had been even half as amusing as Curtis’ best effort, Four Weddings and a Funeral (here we have to settle for one wedding and a funeral), it might have been an enjoyable bit of fluff. But it’s so painfully witless, so hopelessly contrived, that you begin to check your watch after 45 minutes (and there are still 83 loonnng minutes to go). Curtis has a good cast (scene-stealer Bill Nighy, here playing a crassly commercial middle-aged pop star, is the film’s best asset) but saddles them with third-rate material stuffed with fake, prefabricated situations and emotions. And did he really need to add all that nudity and profanity? (I counted two “fuck”s in the first five minutes alone.) It’s a sad day indeed when a romantic comedy gets branded with an R rating. It’s even sadder that the film’s one gay couple gets to enjoy only a stiff, antiseptic hug. Bah, humbug. (citywide)

Kyle Counts is the film critic for the Gay and Lesbian Times