Here's a new perspective.
I just finished Elephant. By all accounts I should have loved this movie, but I am practically seething with anger. Only Van Sant could have turned such powerful subject matter into something so completely ineffective. He has absolutely nothing to say, he just builds his characters out of cliches and then revels in his own masturbatory filmmaking for the duration of the movie. Paranoid Park was an annoyance, but this movie is a disgrace.