"As somebody once said, there's a difference between a failure and a fiasco."
The first words of Cameron Crowe's new movie Elizabethtown refer to the plight of the movie's hero, although they might just as easily apply to the film itself.
The first time I sat through Elizabethtown — as a meandering, 133-minute cut at the Toronto Film Festival — it was a fiasco. Preview audiences slammed the movie, and Crowe, rarely one to ignore the voice of the people, rushed back to the editing room to piece together a new cut shorn of nearly 20 minutes of footage.
Now, in its official theatrical version, Elizabethtown is merely a failure.
The movie is another one of Crowe's Jerry Maguire-esque tales of a golden boy humbled, brought down to earth and reborn on the wings of love — but the director seems like he's on autopilot here, and no amount of re-edits can disguise that.
Reigning Hollywood heartthrob Orlando Bloom has the golden boy role this time, playing a depressed urban overachiever who returns to his provincial hometown for his father's funeral, only to find himself charmed by the locals and redeemed by the love of a slightly wacky woman. Don't fault Crowe for a story that sounds strangely similar to last year's infinitely better Garden State, but feel free to blame him for doing so little with it.
The locals who eventually lift Bloom's character out of his deep funk are a collection of small-town Southern stereotypes, each basically defined by a single adjective (the rowdy one, the goofy one, the cranky one, etc.) and all ultimately endearing. Most endearing of all, of course, is Bloom's love interest, an eccentric flight attendant played by Kirsten Dunst — an average-at-best actress who tries way too hard here, struggling with snappy banter and deep quirks that Renee Zellweger could navigate in her sleep.
I could go on about the movie's gratuitous subplots, its tedious last act (culminating in an interminable road trip), its manipulative soundtrack (note to Mr. Crowe: an Elton John song is no substitute for genuine emotion), or the fundamental shapelessness of it all. But the real problem is that Elizabethtown is a romantic comedy built around a romance that, simply put, just doesn't work. Dunst looks self-conscious and desperate; Bloom is blank (a pretty android who doesn't seem remotely interested in Dunst or much of anything else); and the actors generate almost zero heat together.
Elizabethtown is a bit shorter now, true, but the movie is still a free-ranging mess. There surely must be differences between failure and fiasco, between history repeating itself as tragedy and then as farce, but sometimes it all seems like so much hair-splitting. Any way you look at it, Elizabethtown is not a pretty picture.
The Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Part II
The big opening parties and galas have come and gone, but there's still a lot more going on this week at the 16th Annual Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. It's all happening right now over at Tampa Theatre, with selected screenings at Sunrise Cinemas, so what are you waiting for?
Fabulous is the operative word when Charles Busch, the Tony Award-winning playwright/actor/author/drag-queen diva, drops by Tampa Theatre for Wednesday's 7:30 p.m. screening of The Lady in Question is Charles Busch. Meanwhile, the festival's more serious side surfaces with Unveiled (7:30 p.m. at Sunrise), an award-winning drama about an Iranian woman forced into exile when the Islamic authorities find out about her love for another woman.
Thursday's line-up begins with something completely different: Both (5:30 p.m.), a tale of extreme gender-confusion about a young Peruvian woman who was born a hermaphrodite and initially raised as a boy. Also screening on Thursday is Butterfly (7:30 p.m.), a sweet but somewhat clichéd Hong Kong production about blossoming romance between two Chinese women — one married with children, the other a bohemian musician.
The only film I was able to preview for Friday, Oct. 14, is The Nomi Song (11:15 p.m.) — a fascinating and highly recommended doc on the late, great performance artist/faux-alien Klaus Nomi — but there are several other offerings that sound intriguing. A girls-on-the-run romp from Serbia, Take a Deep Breath (5:30 p.m.), seems like a good bet, as does Guys and Balls (7:15 p.m., Sunrise), a German comedy about an all-gay soccer team (not to be confused with the Thai cult fave Iron Ladies). Also almost certain to be worth checking out, at least for the stout of heart, is the multi-award-winning Argentinean film A Year without Love (9:30 p.m.), a reportedly intense but compassionate look at an HIV-positive man finding comfort in the world of S&M.
The festival's final weekend is jam-packed, beginning on Saturday with two collections of short films (one for women at 3 p.m. and one for men at 5 p.m.), followed at 7:45 p.m. by Freshman Orientation, a comedy that's being billed, for better or worse, as a gay Porky's.
If that sounds a bit too silly, there's always the acclaimed Canadian thriller Show Me (7:45 p.m., Sunrise), in which a kidnapped woman and her captors play serious head games. Even further out on the edge is Garcon Stupide (11:15 p.m.), a prickly but strangely poetic character study from Switzerland that gets deep under the skin of its confused young anti-hero. Uncompromisingly tough but ultimately rapturous stuff, Garcon Stupide is a coming-of-age movie for people who hate coming-of-age movies, and one of this festival's strongest offerings.
Closing day festivities begin at 1 p.m. Sunday, with a full day of food, film and fun at Tampa Theatre. Movie-wise, the highlight of the day is the thoroughly delightful Wilby Wonderful (5 p.m.), a beautifully acted and endearingly off-center ensemble comedy about a small town dealing with a local sex scandal.
The festival's closing-night film is Adam & Steve (7:30 p.m.), a broadly-written boy-meets-boy comedy pumped up by familiar faces like Parker Posey and Chris Kattan (who is expected to attend the screening). I have to admit I didn't laugh too much at Adam & Steve, but I'm sure the movie will seem a whole lot funnier from the middle of a huge, happy crowd at Tampa Theatre. From that vantage point, it's bound to be a fitting send-off for a festival filled with serious pleasures, but that's smart enough to know you always leave 'em laughing.
For more information visit the festival's website: www.tiglff.com or call 813-879-4220. Tickets may be ordered online and purchased at various outlets throughout Tampa Bay.
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.