If you’re wondering if Elizabethtown is as boring and pointless as its ads; it is. It’s impossible to believe that the same Cameron Crowe who gave us Almost Famous produced Elizabethtown. I was wondering if he’s had a stroke. He should get a workup by a specialist and have any medications checked. Something is seriously, seriously wrong with his brain. This movie is terrible. It looked like it was made by a brain-damaged high school student trying to imitate Sofia Coppola.
Orlando Bloom plays a shoe designer whose failed product cost his company a billion dollars. Apparently, they only manufacture a billion dollars worth of shoes at a time and they either sink or swim. The cold gray scenes at his workplace resemble those minimalist movies where the bosses speak in ominous gibberish and you don’t know who to trust. The movie is so turbid that when he leaves the building, I don’t even know if he's been fired or not. When he goes home to his gray minimalistic apartment, the movie switches to a variant of this type of movie, the sudden brutality version. In keeping with the new ethic, he invents a creepy suicide machine out of a knife and a piece of exercise equipment. We are forced to look at the knife stabbing the air over and over. The movie switches genres again when he gets a call telling him that his father has died. At that point the movie becomes a botched human drama where characters you are supposed to like are bizarre and inhuman. When Bloom’s character has to go across country to deal with his father’s death, his mother and sister see him off at the airport as casually as if they were sending him on a business trip.
Article comments
1 - S
Wasn't this movie already done in garden state?
Boy comes home for a parent's death and finds and falls in love with a quirky girl...
2 - Cerulean
Good point, it seemed to have been made with recycled parts.
3 - Cerulean
More curious dealings. A news index only lists one review of Elizabethtown, a positive one from from a small town newspaper. It's amateurishly written. Here's a quote: "No matter the celebration or pain, Crowe's interplay with the quirky characters cements the bliss of "Elizabethtown."
http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/051016-rutheford-elizabethtown.html
Well, cement my bliss.
My own title here used to say "Elizabethtown Is A Terrible Movie" but now it just says, "Movie Review: Elizabethtown" Why?
What gives?
4 - Cerulean
More hard to believe reviews, The TV ad for Elizabethtown quoted Mike Wilber of NBC-TV giving it four stars. They also quoted Don Harper of Good News TV as saying it was "The Date-Night Movie Of The Year."
The lettering of the names of both reviewers were hard to read in spite of the fact that I have a large screen TV. I'm not sure of the spelling, although I looked at the frames many times. I can't find online confirmation of the quotes, but that doesn't prove anything.
5 - uao
"****1/2"
--Don Hildercrest
KCOB-TV
"Bring the children!"
--Mary Stolz
The Weekend Movie Guide
"A must see!"
--Martin Hennesy
Filmgoers Weekly
"Enthralling...an edge of the seat thriller!"
--Lucy Cruz
Popcorn! magazine
re: comment 4
An old trick in this burg is to put bogus reviewers' names in the ads of turkeys with gushing blurbs attributed to them. These "critics" are attributed to phoney shows and publications.
Eventually, SONY or someone got busted for this practice a couple of years ago (Hollywood had been doing this pretty much since the early days, in one form or another)
I don't know if the studios still make up bogus names, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do; after all, it's tradition.
Insofar as they don't, I've seen plenty of famous hacks like Gene Shalit sat things like "Fabulous!" or "Magnificent!" or "Action Movie of the Year!". And lesser-known hacks for local TV stations in markets like Fresno, Omaha, or Indianapolis.
6 - Anonymous
This movie isn't as horrible as you exaggerate it to be.
You act as if someone can't look at their dead father with detached curiosity, as if a mother and a sister can't casually send off their son/brother to retrieve his father's body.
Many of the things you describe as "inexplicably" aren't at all inexplicable. Not everyone acts a certain way when misfortune hits. And that's what I like about this movie. The characters deal with this one man's death in different ways. These characters actually have personality unlike the millions of extremely predictable characters in every other movie. The characters in other movies are all the same. They cry for a family member's death no matter how unfamiliar a family member is. They sink themselves deep in reclusion, crying and refusing to eat because of such death. The characters react the way they're typically "supposed" to react: the reaction Hollywood sticks into their numerous sappy films. Those movies fail to consider the vast range of emotions and reactions people have to trauma.
So why not be detached when a family member dies? Why not dance in memory of a deceased loved one? Why not learn to live life from some quirky flight attendant met in an airplane flight? Why not invent some crazy suicide machine, then suddenly decide not to kill yourself after hearing your sister cry about your lost father on the phone? Why not applaud a woman pouring out her heart in a not-so-perfect tap dance, while everyone else applauds? Why not?
It is the characters' abilities to build up and eventually pour out their sentiments in their seemingly insignificant and strange actions that allow this movie to be different. Sure, some things the characters do aren't ordinary. But such deviance from the norm is what makes this movie so good.
7 - Cerulean
Cameron? No, seriously, that was well-written. I could see how perhaps he had wanted to portray what you described. For me, it came off so poorly that it just didn't work, but apparently it did for you and some others. It's true that the stereotypical reactions in Hollywood movies are not necessarily what happens in real life.
8 - mrtnn
I have to say that I've lost respect for Cameron Crowe after this near unwatchable film. It's an embarrassment for all concerned. Was it a case of everyone being so coked up that no one had the guts to tell him, "Hey, this script is awful."?
Kristen Dunst is so forecefully perky I wanted to puke.
Orlando Bloom is wrong for the character (if there is one) also.
Give me these two hours of my life back!!!!!!