Movie: Elizabethtown: Part I

This last Sunday I took some time off from football and went with my wife to the new movie Elizabethtown by Cameron Crowe who also did Almost Famous. Most of the movie critics are wrong this is a good movie andI really enjoyed it. It is the story of a young shoe company executive (Orlando Bloom) who lives and works for an athletic shoe company in Oregon (Nike.... but they use another name) and his boss and owner of the company is "Phil" a rip off of Phil Knight of Nike. Bloom designs a shoe that loses billions of dollars and is fired by Phil. There is a nice shot of Portland as Bloom is flown by helicopter to the shoe company headquarters. After he is fired, Bloom is about to commit suicide when he receives a call from his sister that his father has died while visiting relative in Elizabethtown Kentucky and Bloom has to take a "red eye" flight from Portland to Kentucky to bring his fathers body back to Oregon. His mother and sister also live in Oregon. On the airplane flight he meets a quirky flight attendant Kirsten Dunst and they develop a relationship over time. In Elizabethtown Bloom meets all of his father's relatives and friends. This is a small town and everyone knows everything. There is a running gag that everyone in Kentucky say that he is from is from "California" and he keeps correcting them that he is from Oregon.( ie everyone in middle America think that the west coast is only California) The movie deals with a number of issues but I loved the warm and loving way Crowe portrays "Middle America" full of good and caring people. The movie ends with Bloom taking his father back to Oregon in a cross country road trip that is worth the price of admission. ( click on the title above for a link to the Internet Movie Database info on Elizabethtown) More in part II.