The Standard [siff] opens with a wandering shot of EveryHigh USA (actually, director Jordan Albertsen’s Whidbey Island alma mater). The usual menagerie of teenagers lounge about in the courtyard: a guitar strummer, stoners, oppressed freshmen, skaters. Paths intersect, friends are spotted having serious conversations, and a kid slides past the principal to grab a forgotten lunch from his car. As the camera follows him to the parking lot, we quickly guess that it isn’t just a sandwich in his glovebox. Out comes a gun, which he worriedly holds to his head. The screen goes black and a shot rings out.

When the white titles have finished rolling over the dark screen and ominous music, it’s three days earlier. Before the big event, when everyone’s lives are carefree and ridiculously dull. Days are occupied with fights over who’s (not) buying the pot, stocking grocery store shelves, groaning over the lameness of standardized testing, and skipping class to smoke the aforementioned marijuana. The next time you feel like complaining about the unrealistic lives of kids on primetime teen dramas, remember how completely boring the surface of high school existence actually is when it’s not embellished by hip writers. Finishing that last overdue paper can cause major angst and disrupts a long term relationship. It’s all deadly serious to the kids, but they have a lot of trouble selling it as anything other than terribly banal to the rest of us.

The story goes on like this for a little more than an hour until we get back to the beginning again. Along the way, confused, but slightly off-track good student Dylan sorts out issues academic, romantic, and family. Then we find out that the school shooting wasn’t what we thought it was at all. When it’s all over, Coldplay swells over the credits. It’s a cheap and unearned ending that offends the audience’s patience without being the least bit provocative. If you want to watch a movie about school violence, you’d do much better to rent Elephant. Gus Van Sant’s meditation on the Columbine shootings is a masterpiece, and it even features the star of this movie.

(screenings on 15 & 17 June at the Egyptian)