Wednesday, October 26, 2005

"Elizabethtown": Some Thoughts

Director-writer Cameron Crowe has written and directed two great movies, 1996's Jerry Maguire and 2000's Almost Famous. There are traces of both in his latest, Elizabethtown, in which Orlando Bloom stars as a failed wunderkind tennis-shoe designer who sets aside plans to kill himself so that he can retrieve the body of his father, who has just died during a visit to Kentucky.

Unfortunately, there are traces of other stories, too -- scores of 'em.

So it's about a guy coming to terms with the deceased father he never really knew, right?

Well ... on the nearly empty flight to Kentucky he meets a kook of a waitress (played by the adorable Kirsten Dunst) who is this pop cultural Zen master, life-affirming force, see ...

Oh, so the movie is a romance, huh?

Well ... Crowe throws in an awful lot of music. I mean, it's a killer soundtrack, everything from Elton John and Tom Petty to Ryan Adams and My Morning Jacket, and the songs speak to the soul of the characters and the divine power of art and all that jazz.

So it's a movie about the power of rock 'n' roll?

Well ... not exactly. There's a road trip, see ...

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