Does it have “My Funny Valentine” on it?

One of the movies I really want to see is Elizabethtown, mainly because I’ve decided over the last year or so that I want to be Cameron Crowe. I just love the warmth and affection he brings to every single project he does (well, I haven’t seen Vanilla Sky, so I don’t know about that one.) I’ve read some reviews of Elizabethtown, which all seem to make the same point: the film is a big, dopey, lovable mess, which is just fine by me. It seems to me that a great chef can still just do a “Let’s toss a bit of everything into the pot and see what happens after I simmer it for a while” kind of thing, and still come up with something edible.

Anyway, I read Jeff Simon’s review of Elizabethtown the other day. Simon’s the main film critic for The Buffalo News. I don’t always like Simon all that much — he can elevate pretentiousness to levels not usually seen in these parts — but every once in a while he comes up with a metaphor that I just love. Here’s his metaphor for Elizabethtown:

[Cameron Crowe] didn’t make a movie here, he made a mix tape of sights and emotions for us and gave it to us as an open-hearted act of friendship. In other words, he threw together a lot of stuff that means a lot to him and gave it to us in the hope we can sort it out.

I like that — and it seems to me that this metaphor might also describe this very blog! I mean, that’s basically what I do: just link and write about stuff that’s all over the map, with a hand-scrawled notecard saying “I hope you like this too”.

Yup: Byzantium’s Shores is the blogging equivalent of a mix tape. I like that.

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