Movies I Have No Intention Of Seeing, #18


Elizabethtown


starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon

directed by Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, Say Anything...)



I didn't say anything about it yesterday because it was still too fresh and too painful. Besides, I was still kind of weak from all the cutting. I cut so I can feel.


Seriously, come on. Josh Paul totally caught that ball. So strike three, yes? Out, yes? Everybody, yes? Yes. OK. Thank you.

I understand there's a high probability that many of you have no idea what this picture is about. And that's OK. For most of you it should be enough to know that it makes me unhappy. I know the way you vultures get off on that kind of thing.

I could talk about this for a whole post, but I've chosen not to. There are other things I could easily turn into happy blogposts as well today, which is pretty goddamn typical. You scrape and you scrape all week to find things to blog about. Some weeks all you've got are racist burritos and Voltron. Those are the hard weeks. And then Friday rolls around and you think "Phew, thank God I can fall back on my lame-ass recurring gimmick post to fill in the blank and I can finally limp into the weekend with this horrible news-less week behind me."

And then, just to fuck with me, out of the sky we get a story about attempted fetus theft. Did you get that? Fetus. Theft. Fetus theft. It's got blood, it's got sex (one assumes, roughly nine months prior, yes?) and--most importantly--it's got fucking bat-shit crazy people. All right in Pops' wheelhouse. Also it's got amazing potential for me to make an ass out of myself by fashioning some crude jokes at the expense of other people's suffering. Also a specialty of mine. And we all know how much I love getting e-mail.

If that weren't enough, just to rub it in my face, we also get this fascinating story about archaeologists discovering 4,000 year old Chinese noodles. You all remember my groundbreaking work when presented with the 28,000 year old stone dildo, I'm sure. Sure, this isn't as obviously good as that find (for blog purposes), but there's some excellent comedic potential in four-millennia-old Chinese food leftovers. Plus I think the word "noodle" is really funny. Noodle. Noooooodle.

But alas, such is life. Here I am about to talk about some goddamn movie about some shit, I'm not even sure what. Thanks, Cameron Crowe. Thanks a lot. First you stick us with Vanilla Sky and now you disrupt my life in this way. One more infraction and I'm totally talking you off my stalker speed-dial.

Cameron Crowe, the man who gave hope to all aimless, shiftless, awkward boys everywhere with Say Anything..., the man who tricked us all into watching a chick-flick by putting football in it in Jerry Maguire, the man who confirmed for us at last that Bridget Fonda was a talentless, charisma-free occupier of space coasting on her family name in Singles... We as a people owe the man a great deal.

Speaking of talentless and charisma-free, this new movie, Elizabethtown, stars both Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom, two very sort-of-able actors who are normally very easily overshadowed by whomever else happens to be on screen with them. Whether it's Aragorn or Spider-Man or... a ficus, maybe... Hey, did you guys know Orlando Bloom was in Pirates of the Caribbean? I just saw that on IMDb. You know, in a thousand years I never would have guessed that. I remember Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, that dude with the weird goggly eye, even Kiera Knightly, but Orlando Bloom? Nope, can't picture it. What did he play in that one?

In Elizabethtown, our Orlando plays an American (NOT Cameron Crowe, honest!) who goes back to visit his dad's Kentucky hometown after the old man dies. So we get to see Mr. Bloom do an American accent. I'm a little worried, to be honest, because in all the commercials I've seen, I've never once heard Orlando talk. Never. It must really be awful. Like Richard Gere's Irishman in The Jackal awful.

All right, I admit it, I went too far with that one.

Mostly I'm just confused. It's a modern story about love and family and whatever... so how are they going to work in Orlando using a sword? Frankly, if he's not chopping people and/or orcs into two messy halves with a giant bastard sword, I'm not sure I'm down with it. Maybe the small Kentucky town gets besieged by Saracens or Greeks or something. Or ooh! Tennesseans. That would be totally scary.

Kirsten Dunst is a movie star, but I'm not really sure why. Sure, she was in Spider-Man, but it's not like she PLAYED Spider-Man. She played Screamy-Girl. She got tied up and dangled off things a lot. Oh, I get it now. It's the bondage people. She's got a following.

The funny thing about the reviews for Elizabethtown is that a) they are all almost identical and b) they are all so very very sad. Nobody seems to have the balls to say "this movie is terrible". Instead they are all (to a person, all two of the ones that I have read in preparation for this) lament the greatness of Crowe (Cameron I still mean, not Russell) and work in all this ass-kissing praise for his earlier work while gently suggesting that maybe this film, so very very unfortunately, hasn't quite lived up to his remarkable, ungodly, perfect skills, for shame and for shame again. O bitter regret! O wallow and consternation! O pernicious vexation!

Look, sometimes talented people produce things that suck. Take this blogpost, for instance.

I should give it one Hot Babysitter just on Crowe's reputation alone, but then, you know what, I wouldn't be any better than the reviewers who can't call a turd a turd. Plus I really want to debut my new scheme for registering my complete disinterest in a Movie I Have No Intention Of Seeing. The red circle with the slash through it wasn't flashy enough.

Now, I present you with a universally recognized signifier of Zero. Ladies, Gentleman and Bucketeers, I give you:

Andrew Shue!

If anything represents zero entertainment value AND a complete lack of enthusiasm from me, it's Andrew Shue. All those years of not watching Melrose Place will not have been in vain.

This film rates a very sad ZERO (out of three) on the Hot Babysitter Scale.


Pierzynski was out. The umpire said so. On to Game 3.


Pops
- posted by Pops @ 9:25 AM