Well, we tried to watch Elephant tonight. I heard it was good, so I rented it. But about 20 minutes into the movie I decided to leave the room, and five minutes later the rest of the people watching decided to shut it off as well.

I'm not going to spoil what exactly it's about, but suffice it to say, if you know going in what's going to happen, the entire movie is a slow, tense build that's extremely unpleasant to watch, because you know precisely what's coming and you can't imagine having to watch it, much less in the slow, extremely realistic documentary-style that Gus Van Sant chose.

I don't know how graphic the movie is, once they actually get to the fireworks factory, because we turned it off long before that part. But if the idea of waiting and waiting for an inevitable massacre is unpleasant to you, I wouldn't recommend Elephant.

I never liked horror movies when I was a kid. Never appealed to me. And within the last few months my anticipation of extremely graphic violence has caused me to leave two movies (this and The Butterfly Effect)in the very early going, just out of fear of where the movie might go. In both cases, I'm sure I could have stayed--it's not gonna kill me--but why would I want to?

Honestly, I'm a little surprised by this, but it turns out there are limits to how much I want to be disturbed.