A movie with dreamy Orlando Bloom, perky Kirsten Dunst, venerable Susan Sarandon, and king of romance spinning yarns set to great music director Camerown Crowe? How can this go wrong?
I borrowed it from my co-worker again. She's got a library of everything. I had medium to high hopes for this movie, but it ended up falling short for me on many levels. First of all, dreamy Orlando (this is what I call him all the time) should work harder on his American accent. And Kirsten Dunst should work harder on her Kentuckian accent.
Those are small gripes. The bottom line is that this plot, when it actually manages to connect in places, has been done before, including by Crowe himself.
Did Cameron mean for this to flow like a zigzag stream of consciousness because that's what it felt like. Orlando plays Drew, a colossal failure in shoe design, he just finds out, who loses his job. He also loses his father, a man he barely knew thanks to his high hopes for success.
The movie first seems to be about living life despite setbacks, and it ends with that feeling too, but the whole of the middle is something else entirely. You see him fail, get fired by Alec Baldwin (ouch), and contemplate suicide or at least a very sharp turn on an exercise bike. Then, he's flying from home to Kentucky to claim his father's remains from his very typically Southern extended relatives, though he meets a unique flight attendant. It then becomes sort of an atypical love story along the lines of Forces of Nature or something. While he's in Kentucky, though, it's about reconciling his roots with his actual memories, though Kirsten's character keeps popping up. It was just extremely disjointed, and that detracted from the purported emotional resonance. I felt nothing for dreamy Orlando's character, and this was supposed to be that character's journey. Sure, Drew takes a road trip in the end, and the soundtrack is simply amazing (Cameron Crowe never fails on the soundtracks to his movies), but everything else feels empty and forced, right down to dreamy Orlando's American accent.
It feels like Jerry Maguire without the heart or Say Anything without the passion. I haven't seen Almost Famous, but I'm sure that's in here somewhere.
At best, I rate it a 6 out of 10, which in my ratings scale stands for "Cute." That's what it was - cute. Dreamy Orlando and Kirsten have some chemistry, and Dreamy is dreamy.
The test: will she be buying it? The answer: I can safely say no. I might watch it on cable. I might buy the soundtrack. Most likely, I will go look for some older Elton John albums on CD.