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.