Elizabethtown (2005)

Who’s in it

Kirsten Dunst, Orlando Bloom, Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Biel

What was good

The first half hour to forty five minutes of the movie. It was intriguing, quirky, and seemed to be engaging. Bloom created this terrible shoe that bombed and lost his company an astounding 972 million dollars. Then, on the same day, his dad died. There were even funny parts in his interactions with his boss (Baldwin).

What sucked

Pretty much everything else. He gets on a plane to go get his dad, who is in Kentucky somewhere, and the movie gets derailed. I think it tries to give the viewer a first hand sense of what it is like to start from scratch in getting to know your roots, but it also tried to throw in there the mixed emotions that he is dealing with from his failure, which is strange and uncommon. He meets Kirsten Dunst who is a flight attendant for about 10 minutes in the good first part of the movie. She is fun and quirky, and her part isn’t bad, nor their relationship. The movie just doesn’t seem to know when to end, and wanders all over the place trying to get there.

Who should go see this

I don’t think I’d recommend this to anyone. I like Bloom, and even more so Dunst. I was glad I watched it with her, but not glad enough for the two plus hours long this movie is. I guess if you like strange movies, see this. The director also did Almost Famous, and Vanilla Sky. This is more like Almost Famous, but that movie was more focused, you just don’t leave with any sort of fuzzy feeling, and dammit, you rent a movie for entertainment, not to think too hard.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• Bring It On (2000)
• Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
• Wimbledon (2004)
• Red Eye (2005)
• Get Shorty (1995)

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.