Elizabethtown, Worth a trip?

So I had this wonderful idea on Friday. Rather than attending a good friend's party, I decided to persuade my boyfriend to take me to see Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown" on it's opening night. What a sad sad mistake I made. Had I told him to take 20 dollars, crumble it up, and throw it in the street, he would have been more pleased with the night's outcome. It definitely would have been more entertaining for us both. But this is still a gross understatement.

I am not exaggerating when I say that Elizabethtown is by far the worst, most poorly made, ill-conceived, and badly written film I have ever seen in my entire life... possibly the worst film in the entire history of cinema. I never write about movies in my blog, but if I can prevent one poor soul from the two unbearable hours of misery I endured, I will be content with this post.

Never in all my years have I seen an audience so disgruntled by any film. Even the insanely drunk crowd behind us, who spent the better part of the night laughing inappropriately at how unfunny the film was eventually became angered as the film dragged on. The couple sitting next to us eventually ended up 5 feet further away from one another with their arms folded defensively across their chests. Whether it was a first date or not, it was clear that it would be their last. Yes, this film will definitely be the downfall of many would-be relationships. Of all the assesments of this film that I've heard, I have to say, my little sister summed it up best when I called her the next day, only to find out that I was too late and that she had already wasted her time and money seeing it, when she said, "For two hours, I wanted to kill myself. The ticket lady should have given us razor blades instead of tickets." Once again, a gross understatement.

Having made films like Jerry McGuire and Vanilla Sky, I had come to expect more from Cameron Crowe. But this was beyond ameteurish. It was plain torture. It called to mind the infinitely long Andy Warhol film of a fly sitting on a man's arm. I wondered if Crowe got some similar sick pleasure out of forcing us to sit there for 2 hours vainly hoping there would be a point to what we'd been watching. Sadly, the joke was on us. And there was really nothing funny about it.

I probably should not have admitt to my boyfriend afterwards that I had already read the bad reviews the film had gotten before we went to see it. "It was galling," "It was a spectacular disappointment," "It was a disaster of mythic proportions." Maybe that should have given it away? Nevertheless, I'd been convinced that the film was worth seeing if only to see my favorite elf, Orlando Bloom. Much to my dismay, by the end of the film, I, myself, was inclined to hop on an excercise-bike-turned-instrument-of-death in the way he did in the film. That would have been far less painful!

My prediction? By next weekend, this film will crash and burn much in the way the ridiculous giant bird in the memorial service scene did. Now THAT will be entertaining.