Posts Tagged ‘Cameron Crowe’
3 items.
Much like Chris Tucker seems only able to perform in Rush Hour movies, Orlando Bloom seems only capable of taking a role where the brandishing of antiquated weaponry is a requirement. Be it longbow, sword or musket – Bloom is your man!
It’s a fairly commonplace assertion that Bloom has cast himself in the mold of a modern Errol Flynn – having taken roles in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean and it’s sequels, Troy and Kingdom of Heaven. I don’t think is a totally negative thing to aspire to. Quite frankly, the movies are sorely lacking in brave adventure and derring-do. If someone were to come along and revitalize the persona, why not Bloom?
Okay, he’s a little bit pretty. Alright, not just pretty – but MAN pretty. Not the kind of rakish rouge you would expect to swing in from a rope and save you. But I suppose you take what you get.
I’ve been very interested in seeing Elizabethtown since I first saw the trailers. This is one of those movies where I thought it came out two weeks ago and then was really disapointed when it didn’t. Then I thought it came out again last week and was disapointed again. I really need to read the one-sheet posters for release dates much closer.
I’m excited pretty much because any movie with Cameron Crowe’s name on it is a "must-see" in my book. Between Say Anything…, Singles and Almost Famous, the man’s bitter-sweet storytelling hits me right where I live. I can do without Jerry Maguire and Vanilla Sky, but that’s why pencils have erasers, right?
I found it curious to learn that Crowe had Bloom in mind from the onset as his protagonist. When it looked like Bloom couldn’t do the role, he brought on another man pretty up-and-comer Ashton Kutcher to fill the role. I think this would have made the movie much less interesting for me. Good think Crowe thought Kutcher didn’t have any chemistry with Kirsten Dunst and fired him. Then again, cardboard boxes have more chemistry than Kirsten Dunst, so maybe it was just wish fulfillment on Crowe’s part to dump Kutcher when Bloom became available.
Elizabethtown is interesting in that I think it provides Bloom an opportunity to prove something he hasn’t tried before. That’s always exciting.
:: switching gears ::
I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to again mention that I will stop selling all t-shirts, hoodies and baby doll tees from the store on October 31. Leave a note here now means that it will stay up until Monday. That’s what they call "saturation," kids.
At any rate, three of the designs will be retired forever. So if you want "Under Construction," "Emerging" or "Truman in a Purse" now is the time to get them. After the 31st, the won’t be available ever again!
As for the other shirts – they’ll come back at some point, I just don’t know when. So maybe you’re thinking someone might enjoy a "Spoiler" t-shirt for a November birthday or maybe for the holidays. Best to grab them now because I don’t know if I can make them available by then.
I need to let you know that part of the reason I’m closing off this section of the store is so I can get caught up on orders. But the bigger reason is so I can begin work on a new book collecting the first year of Theater Hopper strips.
I’m having some trouble trying to decide how to distribute the information. Whether it’s one large book about 180 pages and retailing for $20 or splitting the content into two volumes of 90 pages each with the release dates spaced apart and retailing for $10.
There has been some debate about it in the THorum with more specifics than I can get into here. There is also a poll attached. I’d love to hear your feedback if you consider yourself someone interested in buying a Theater Hopper book. If you’re not comfortable posting in the THorum, I am also receptive to e-mails.
Thanks.
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Due to the technical difficulties that prevented me from doing a strip on Wednesday, I haven’t really picked up a pencil since completing Monday’s strip. I feel a little rusty! Remember kids, that’s why it’s important to draw every day.
Anyway, feeling like I tried to put a lot into today’s comic and I have stayed up well past my bed time, this won’t be much of a blog. Just take heart in the fact that I have my new 19" flat screen LCD Samsung monitor and I love it. I love it enough to post pictures of it on the internet for you to ogle at:
I always get really self-conscious drawing celebrities. You’d think for a comic about movies and pop-culture, I would have a more refined sense of caricature. Nope, not really. I maintain that pretty much all of my character designs are the same, I just give them different haircuts.
I ∗do∗ think my rendition of Cameron Crowe turned out pretty well. But does that play to anyone who isn’t a cinephile? I mean, how familiar is the general population with the physically appearance of a director? I mean if he isn’t Spielberg, Scorsese or Hitchcock?
At any rate, I’ll be back later with a more thorough blog. In the meantime, why don’t you vote for Theater Hopper at Webcomics List to see my sketch of Legolas from The Lord of the Rings trilogy? I think that one came out pretty nice. Legolas of course being the filter through which I view all of Orlando Bloom’s subsequent roles.
Enjoy!
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In case you’re wondering who that guy is in the last panel, it’s supposed to be Elizabethtown director Cameron Crowe. I drew him once before not last Friday, but the Friday before that. Crowe is such a mild-mannered guy, I thought it would be funny to depict him committing a felony.
If you still don’t know anything about Cameron Crowe, don’t worry. Tom doesn’t seem to know much about his abductor, either.
As you may have surmised, Cami and I saw Elizabethtown this weekend and were not pleased. I was looking for a soapbox to rant about it, then remembered I have this comic. My illustrated avatar doesn’t typically breech the fourth wall so directly in these situations, but I thought it made sense that he talk to "you" in the sense of the audience since his/my displeasure with the movie was so great.
I wanted to like this movie. I really wanted to like this movie. In fact, when we left the theater and Cami was actually ANGRY about the time we just spent watching it, I swung hard in the opposite direction – Playing Devil’s Advocate to the point where Satan himself came to me and said "Dude, seriously. It was a bad movie. Stop speaking up for it in my name. It’s not good for business."
To me, the three acts of the film played like three separate movies. The first act dealing with Drew’s corporate life and his failure. The second detailing the harmless eccentricities of Southern people and the third capturing Drew’s cross-country trek back to Oregon. It seemed like barely any of these arcs related to each other. I feel in love with the third act. If they could have condensed the first two acts and expanded the third, I would have been much more interested in that.
There were so many details about the movie that I think were overlooked. In addition to the ones mentioned in the comic (which are the most glaring), what about the 737 that Drew takes into Kentucky – it’s totally empty! No plane that large would ever be that low on passengers. Not even on a red eye. Not even on a crappy airline. Disbelief NOT suspended!
Kristen Dunst’s character gives up a trip to Hawaii to be with Drew during his crisis even though they don’t know each other. Why even mention that at all? Are we supposed to be impressed that she gave up so much to be with this stranger? Giving up a weekend to hang around this guy would be enough!
Why the hell wouldn’t Drew’s mother fly to Elizabethtown to retrieve her husband? Yes, I understand she was in shock. Yes, I understand that she felt his family didn’t like her. But if she loved him to the degree that she would perform an embarrassing tap dance routine in front of them, she couldn’t have gotten on the plane sooner?
The wake hosted in the hotel ballroom with Drew’s cousin’s band playing "Freebird" seemed incredibly cloying and ridiculous – especially in the light of the huge prop bird catching fire at exactly the right moment and various members of the audience laughing and scampering about in slow motion as the sprinkler system burst. Of course the band continues to play, stomping around in pools of water on the stage and their instruments do not electrify them to a crisp.
At a critical juncture in the movie, Drew attempts to break off his relationship with Kristen Dunst’s character and she says he "keeps trying to break up with her even though they’re not together." Was there some other break-up scene I didn’t see? I think they dropped this one back in there to remind us that Drew is actually VERY despondent and planning to kill himself when he gets home. An idea mention once, dropped, then picked up again to add tension, I guess. Some kind of conflict. It was sloppily executed.
What about Drew’s road trip back with his Father’s cremains. His mother and sister had no problem with him spreading them all over the country? Were they ever consulted? Didn’t see that on the screen! You’d think they have a say.
And of course, the big reunion at the end. So we’re supposed to believe that Dunst’s character pulled some strings in her role as a flight attendant to get fly ahead of Drew and be at the Second Largest Farmer’s Market to meet him just in case she showed up? He job must have some pretty flexible work hours and policies!
I dunno. Maybe all of this is nit-picky, but all of these inconsistencies really got to me after two hours in my seat. I expected so much more from Crowe and he let me down. The whole film is like a string of half-baked ideas. Or rather, the film feels like it must have been 3 hours long to start and was edited down for time. There’s probably a better movie in there somewhere, it just sucks that we’ll have to wait for the DVD to see it. In the meantime, the theatrical version is probably going to turn off anyone who is casually interested.
I think that there is probably a larger version of Elizabethtown waiting in the wings. Crowe did the exact same thing with his release of Almost Famous: Untitled. And while that release is vastly superior to the theatrical release, at least the version that landed in theaters had a narrative thread. Elizabethtown doesn’t even have that.
What a waste.
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