This week, Hollywood seems a bit strange.

Hillary Clinton today presented conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson with a cake baked in the shape of a “right wingtip”, forcing him to make good his promise to eat his shoe if her recently published memoir sold over a million copies. Clinton’s revenge might have been even sweeter had she taken inspiration from the very funny 1980 documentary, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, in which the legendary German director does just that. It’s boiled by none other than Californian cuisine creator Alice Waters and served up on a platter – all because Herzog’s rival/friend Errol Morris made a movie, something Herzog thought he’d never do. Indigestion hasn’t felled Herzog – he’s about to start work on another documentary tracking The Enigma Of Loch Ness.

When Gus van Sant was working on Elephant, his elegiac Palme d’Or-winning film based on the 1999 Columbine school shootings, he was inspired by another meditation on senseless violence. Van Sant took both the title and the multi-perspective style of Elephant from British director Alan Clarke’s 1989 BBC programme about violence in Northern Ireland. Van Sant originally thought that Clarke’s title referred to the old Buddhist parable in which several blind men each examine a different part of an elephant and think that they understand the whole, but it turns out that Clarke was actually referring to the proverbial elephant in the room that everyone sees but no one mentions. After nervously watching Van Sant’s Elephant, waiting for the inevitable to begin on an otherwise normal high school day – that is, a day full of barely suppressed anger and hurt – I’d go with number two. Jade Chang 11 July 03