Today's review comes from October 14th, 2005.
Elizabethtown
Director: Cameron Crowe
Starring: Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, and Susan Sarandon
Rating: PG-13
I'm still not used to how quickly movies come out on DVD these days, (hey, didja miss Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory a few months ago? Rent it this Tuesday!) and it seems Hollywood churns out remakes faster and faster as well. Can you believe they've already made a remake of last year's excellent indie hit, Garden State?
Okay, Elizabethtown isn't REALLY a remake of Garden State, although for all intents and purposes it's the same story, complete with Orlando Bloom starring as 'Zach Braff', Kirsten Dunst filling in for 'Natalie Portman', and the state of Kentucky in a supporting role as 'New Jersey.'
The story starts in the same manner as Garden State, with the lead character on a helicopter (instead of an airplane!) contemplating suicide. Not only has Drew Baylor (Bloom) just learned he cost his company almost a billion dollars after designing a shoe nobody wants to wear, he also receives word that his father has died. Needless to say, Drew is having a bad day. (Kinda makes your "office printer ate my paper" day seem a little better, huh?)
The newly fired Drew boards a plane headed for Elizabethtown, Kentucky to retrieve his father’s remains and meets plucky stewardess Reese Witherspoon (whoops, I mean Kirsten Dunst...her character Claire seems very much the type of role Witherspoon would normally play), who take an immediate interest in him for no apparent reason.
Drew is a subdued lost soul in need of saving, and Angel Dunst shows up to do just that. Along the way he learns more about his father's side of the family, and learns to...well....I'm not sure what. But I'm sure he learns something...about family, himself, love, or something. I don't know for sure, but I know I learned something...ABOUT BOREDOM.
The press materials for this film say it's "A love letter to the resilience of the life force." HUH? Oh jeezy creezy, we're dealing with aging hippies here, aren't we? Listen, I love trippy-dippy weepy flicks as much as the next guy, in fact probably more so, but this film is so self-indulgent and meandering, halfway through you can tell it has nowhere to go.
We don't learn ANYTHING about Angel Dunst, we know very little about Bloom's character, in fact, the emphasis here on anything but character development. It seems more important to let a Tom Petty song play for 3 minutes than to give the characters anything interesting to say. I don't mind music playing a big part in films but when Bloom visits the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial and U2's Pride blares on the soundtrack, it's not clever, it's PREDICTABLE.
One look at "Say Anything...", "Singles", "Jerry Maguire", and especially "Almost Famous" will show you how writer/director Cameron Crowe uses music to tell his stories perhaps better than anyone else working in film today. I'm a big fan of Crowe, which makes this review sad to write. For the first time in his career, he's missed the emotional mark, which translates into a film that isn't necessarily BAD, it's just plain BORING.
Tomorrow: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
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