re: When Good Directors Go Bad?: Elizabethtown (2005, Cameron Crowe)

A. Campbell — Sat, 31 May 2008 14:27:58 GMT

Elizabethtown is overstuffed— it's like 3 movies, none of them good: the dead parent, the back-to-your-roots, the meet-cute. Just when one gets interesting, it has to be dropped to pick up the next, and so Crowe's earnest sentiment comes off as cloying, instead of being earned, because the movie keeps skimming the surface instead of plumbing its own depths. Just so, so many things that seem calculated but not true. Like the widow, in the past few days, has time to take up how many hobbies?

Here in Ky., where I drive through E-town regularly, an ad for a sweepstakes played before the movie. The prize? Win an all-expenses paid trip to the actual Elizabethtown. The audience got a kick out of that one.

re: When Good Directors Go Bad?: Elizabethtown (2005, Cameron Crowe)

Jason Alley — Sat, 31 May 2008 09:10:12 GMT

Hmmm...makes me wanna give it another shot. I didn't HATE it either the first time, but as you said, it mostly felt like a pale shadow of his better films.