An Elephant Sitting Still (2018)

The movie masterpiece of depression.

'An Elephant Sitting Still' is the one of the most criminally unknown movies, a bizarre status considering its awards and marketable tragic outcome. Sure, artsy-fartsy critics raved about it, but the mass public are oblivious to its existence as if they’re death itself.

It’s not an excuse that in a world of super heroes and Instagram, patience is considered a handicap. Real stars (opposed to reality stars) would watch this 4-hour, slow-moving, Chinese anti-epic set in one hopeless day with disconnected characters in an industrial town under a grey sky.

Your depression tells me I’m selling it to you, so let’s keep sinking…

'An Elephant Sitting Still' possesses less hope than ‘Beanpole’, ‘Loveless’, ‘Hotel Rwanda’, ‘Requiem for a Dream', ‘Melancholia’, ‘The Road’, ‘The Machinist’, ‘The Turin Horse’, and ‘The Painted Bird’ added together.

If you don’t know any of those great references, then remember when your dog died on the rainy night you became unemployed and were sitting in a queue at the hospital for your lung infection, watching smokers outside the hospital door.

Now that I’ve got you hooked like a dying fish, I’m going to oversell it.

The BEAST OF SADNESS is it being the only movie by director/author Bo Hu. He killed himself 4 months before its debut at the Berlin International Film Festival where it won two awards. He was 29.

The movie reiterates my frustration at the English-speaking world not giving foreign movies a chance. I can’t imagine something of this depth winning an Audience Award there, yet it did in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Poland and Uruguay.

When the border guards catch me, and ask me why I’m escaping my country, it’ll be, “I wanted someone to watch great movies with.”

‘An Elephant Sitting Still’ is one of the special movies of its decade. Please watch… because my misery loves company.

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