[Movies] Elizabethtown

I was on my way out to run errands when Elizabethtown came on HBO. I was waiting for my computer to finish ripping a few songs before I left and I found myself hooked before I fully realized it. What was left was me needing to finish the entire movie as I texted my afternoon appointments that I was going to be late given the dire need to finish this movie.

You know how that feels, right? That odd compulsion that something just has to be done before anything else can take place. The world must stop while you take the time to finish this one thing. This is what this movie made me feel like.

Elizabethtown is a charming tale from the mind of Cameron Crowe. It's all about Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom), a shoe designer whose life couldn't be any worse when his new design flops and costs the company close to a billion dollars. To top everything all off, he finds out his father has died and he has to go represent the family by flying off to Elizabethtown. Along the way he meets the incessantly chatty flight stewardess Claire (Kirsten Dunst and what follows is something no one could really predict.

The whole story o a trip home to deal with the death of a father felt eerily familiar, and perhaps that influenced my opinion of the film. Then again, that in itself made it such a strong piece - the ability to turn this into something that we can all relate to as a human experience.

Orlando and Dunst were surprisingly good together and their on-screen chemistry seemed quite genuine. The story is a simple one but rather well executed with its fair share of twists and idiosyncrasies. The whole road trip at the end of the film is what really defines this movie for me and keeps it a few steps apart from your usual run-of-the-mill poignant love story.

If you want a feel-good movie with a healthy dose of reality here and there, then this is something I'd highly recommended for you. Try it out - it may just surprise you.