Saturday, Oct. 22, 2005
... I cannot change
I went to see
Elizabethtown last night, and I actually really, really liked it. More than I thought I would.
When I first saw the preview, I thought it looked fantastic, but then I heard such mixed reviews that my expectations were lowered. Then, I saw it, and I could see where the reviewers were coming from, but at the same time, there was enough good about it that it transcended the negative stuff to make it a movie that I quite loved.
The biggest reviewer complaints were that the movie was too scattered. Cameron Crowe tried to cover too many topics in one movie, and it ended up being somewhat disjointed, and too many minor storylines weren't carried through properly.
I definitely saw that--there were certain storylines that were compromised, and I can only assume that they were given more time in the longer cut that didn't make it into theatres. There were points in the movie where a scene would start, and it would take me the first few minutes of the scene to figure out, "Okay, where did this come from; where are they going; what steps did we miss to get here?" But, for the most part, that was overshadowed by the rest of the movie.
I thought that both Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom did an excellent job--Orlando Bloom, especially. The character was, I thought, so well-developed, and his acting was fantastic. Even though a lot of the story was cut, you could tell that he knew it, and you just knew that his character was deeper than what you saw onscreen. There was no doubt that you were only seeing a part of his story, and that, to me, made the parts that you didn't see okay.
Susan Sarandon didn't have a lot of screentime, but there was once scene--her biggest scene in the movie--and by the end, I was in tears. I really do love her as an actress, and this just proved how she doesn't need to be the star to put everything into it.
For me, the biggest thing in any story or movie or anything like that is the relationships. Some people are story-based--leave them with plot holes, and they go crazy. For me, it's all about the relationships. If the acting is real, and the relationships are real, I can overlook some minor continuity gaffs, script problems, or technical difficulties. That's what made this movie for me. The relationships were real enough that everything else took a backseat.
Anyways. I loved it. Say what you will; like it or not; I thought it was fantastic. Definite shortcomings, but the movie itself managed to move past them, and be great despite them, not bad because of them.
It's kind of like Garden State's cousin. A very similar plot--son return home for parent's funeral and meets girl, all the while discovering that his life has more meaning than he thought it did--but a lot more positive, and much more celebratory of life and family than GS is. It's not a Garden State clone, and it's not trying to be the same thing at all, but the similarities are there. Which, considering how much I loved Garden State, isn't a bad thing.
infinite || abyss
posted at 3:43 p.m.
