I didn’t know quite what I was gonna make of this. On the one hand, I’ve become a huge fan of Cameron Crowe over his last two movies, Almost Famous and Vanilla Sky. On the other hand, this looked like, and was being advertised like, it was closer to the more mainstream Jerry Maguire. Not that there’s much wrong with that movie, it’s just, y’know, mainstream

The opening held promise – Orlando Bloom is about to kill himself over the fact he lost his employer nearly $1 billion (can be rounded up to that, anyway) with a knife attached to an expensive exercise bike when his sister calls him to inform him that his father has died. He resolves to go and sort out this whole situation but come back to the bike, “Nothing will stop the plan,” he says in part of his part of the two-person voiceover this movie has between him and Kirsten Dunst. I kind of liked this way of opening – like the way Almost Famous has Billy find the note from his sister, “Listen to Tommy with a candle burning and you’ll see your entire future,” which he does, makes you consider that the whole thing could be some kind of vision, like the whole of Vanilla Sky is one part or another of a whole clusterf**k of dreams. Here, maybe this whole thing takes place in his mind as he’s considering suicide on the bike, systematically changing his own mind. It’s not important, but it’s there if you want it, and I’m one of those strange people who wants that kind of thing in a movie.

The movie is a little too reminiscent of Garden State, which I didn’t like much – Kirsten Dunst’s character at one point tells Bloom to “leave time to dance alone with one hand waving free,” which kind of clinched the comparison to Natalie Portman’s character in my mind – and Susan Sarandon is more annoying than ever (in fact, to be honest, I think I’ve never found her remotely annoying before, but this performance made me feel like she’d secretly been annoying me all my life); her “big scene” is the movie’s major letdown. The movie picks up, though, in the finale of Dunst’s personalised roadtrip for Bloom, a total Cameron Crowe moment of music and quirky feeling. In the end, this movie had me at goodbye.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 at 9:37 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.