The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
A blogger who is even more fascinated with overalls than I has decreed November 20 as “International Overalls Day”. As befits the content of this blog, I may be participating. Further announcements as events warrant!
(Of course, November 20 is a Friday, so I won’t be wearing overalls until after work. I find mildly ironic that my job is one for which overalls would be an ideal uniform, but I doubt I’ll convince the Powers That Be at The Store of this.)
From time to time, when reading a negative review of a movie I’ll see the film described as a “mess”, and often times I’m unsure of what a “mess” is, in terms of a movie. The instance that stands out in my memory is Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. When I was looking for reactions to that movie, I think nearly every article or blog post I read about it called it a “mess”, which I found odd because I didn’t find the movie messy at all.
But now, having re-watched the Cameron Crowe flick Elizabethtown, I understand better what it is to call a movie a mess, because, well, Elizabethtown is one. It’s an amiable mess, to be sure. It’s not the kind of mess a dog makes on the new carpet; it’s the kind of mess that covers the desk of the dotty teacher we all had in school, the one we liked anyway despite his dottiness. (It was a guy teacher for me; yours might have been a woman. Doesn’t matter.) Elizabethtown is a mess. But I really liked it anyway.
Orlando Bloom plays a guy named Drew who works, as the film opens, for an athletic wear company in Portland, Oregon. (It’s not Nike, but as Nike is located in a Portland suburb, it’s pretty clear that we’re talking about Nike here.) Drew is being whisked to the corporate HQ by company helicopter so he can meet with the billionaire CEO (played by Alec Baldwin) so he can be fired. Why is this shoe designer for a hugely successful company getting fired personally by the CEO? Because his latest shoe design is a failure of epic proportions. He’s designed a shoe that has been touted as the Biggest Thing EVER, only to see it universally loathed. The opening scenes show entire semis full of these shoes being returned to the HQ’s warehouse. Drew has just committed Epic FAIL which will cost his company nearly a billion dollars. Oops. (The film doesn’t dwell on the shoe itself much, but we do get to see it a few times, and yes, it looks ridiculous, like the shoe Prince Namor of Atlantis would put on if he was going to go for a jog.)
After this staggering and extremely public failure, Drew is feeling a tad suicidal – but just a tad – until he gets the call, later that night, that his father has passed away, back in the family hometown of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Off Drew goes to return to the home he hasn’t seen in years. On the plane, he meets a flight attendant named Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who comes off as just this side of being a crazy stalker. She talks to him, gives him directions to his hometown, follows him into the terminal so she can shout the directions to him through a crowd (“Remember: Route 60-B!”). Drew gets home, and then we have the usual kind of thing in one of those stories where the city-kid returns to his small-town roots. There are folks who aren’t aware that California and Oregon aren’t the same place, there’s the cousin in his 30s who is still at heart a teenager who wants to get the band back together, there’s the doting older woman who takes one look at Our Hero and concludes that he hasn’t eaten anything since 2003.
One night Drew is feeling lonely and calls everyone he knows, only to get through to no one; and then he dials the number given him by Claire, the almost-crazy flight attendant, who just happens to be off duty and can drive up to hang out with him.
Elizabethtown is a movie that just can’t seem to decide what movie it wants to be, and that’s how it’s a mess. It feels not so much made a cobbled together out of various ideas. It’s as if Cameron Crowe literally couldn’t decide what story he wanted to tell, so he just said the hell with it and told all of them. Hence the result: a film that is so amiable and clearly heartfelt that I can’t dislike it, but still just doesn’t get into my heart the way Crowe’s better films — Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous — do. Elizabethtown has the crashing of a wedding, long conversations by phone, stand-up comedy at a wake, “Freebird” at the same wake, a fire alarm at that same wake, and in the end, a road-trip across the country in which Drew drives places as prescribed for him by Claire, cueing up specific songs on specific CDs as he passes specific points on the trip.
I remember a review by Jeff Simon (of The Buffalo News) of this film, in which he wrote that the film is basically a mix tape. That’s a very good metaphor for the movie, in the way its individual parts all seem disconnected and unrelated except for the larger connecting theme of how it all relates to Drew and his various troubles. Elizabethtown is an unfocused film that lurches from one thing to another, and yet it does so in incredibly likable fashion. Maybe that’s the way that the movie is a metaphor for life itself? I dunno…but the movie is a mess, and still, I liked it a lot.
I’m sure that prison food probably ranks below high school food in quality. I don’t remember ever finding any maggots in my high school meals; but then, even if I had, there was no James Whitmore sitting nearby waiting to take my maggot and feed it to the bird he was nursing back to health. But I obviously have no real basis on which to make this judgment, except for the existence of an item called “Nutriloaf” (or “Nutraloaf”).
Nutraloaf is a special prison food, intended for inmates who have apparently demonstrated behavioral issues. I suppose Nutraloaf is what they feed to the guys who are spending “a month in the hole”. And apparently it is disgusting — so disgusting, in fact, that there have been lawsuits over the serving of Nutraloaf on the basis that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
Well, some fine soul out there actually decided to do a Nutraloaf taste test, making it according to a recipe cited in one of those court cases and then giving it a whirl. My favorite comment was this one: “Even though it doesn’t have a taste, it feels like something is lingering in my mouth. It’s like a Nutri-ghost.”
It certainly can’t be worse than Rachel Greene’s “English trifle”, though:
Note to self: stay out of prison.
Lynn finds this story’s headline appealing, and so do I, for obvious reasons. But this one, an old fave of mine, is sheer genius.
At some point yesterday, this blog received its 500,000th hit, at least as far as SiteMeter is concerned. Thanks to the regular readers, the sporadic readers, the readers who were regulars until I offended them, and the people searching for pictures of Sophie Marceau. (For some reason she gets the most hits.) Since the heyday of blogging seems to be over, I don’t expect this blog’s traffic to ever grow much beyond what it is right now, for the remaining duration of this blog’s existence, however long that ends up being. But it’s still fun.
Onward and upward!
Linkage….
:: So to sum up: Sarah Palin’s “drill” plan involves ignoring how much oil is actually in the ground, how quickly it can be drilled, how easily it can be accessed, and the basic reality of the global oil market. And this is where she thinks she is an expert. (For some reason, being a Republican “expert” doesn’t mean you have to know what you’re talking about. That’s why John McCain keeps showing up on teevee to talk about Afghanistan, a topic on which he’s made a cottage industry being wrong about.)
All for this week.
I have some lazy linkage to dispense with:
:: John Cole’s day is off to a pretty bad start:
Woke up, accidentally put ground red pepper in my coffee instead of cinnamon, did not notice until I took a swig. Tunch ate so much he threw up what can only be described as a cat food cud on the futon. Went to the kitchen to get a damp rag to clean it up, came back and it was gone and Lily was smacking her lips, and then the toilet overflowed.
Yeah, that’s all some pretty good signage that one’s proper place that day should be solidly beneath the blankets.
:: Sure, everybody was linking this a few weeks ago, but some folks may have missed it, so here it is: ever wonder how bats drink? Well, wonder no more, in some of the most stunning nature photography I’ve ever seen.
:: I suppose I’m fortunate that when I was in high school, I tended to make sure that the people who signed my yearbook were people with whom I got along. Not that I was afraid of this kind of thing, but you never know….
:: Thanks to whoever linked this: Insanewiches, insane sandwich fun!
:: I also saw this all over the place, but it’s a fun timewaster: The Eyeballing Game.
Enjoy. Or not.
Oddities abound!
:: I can’t remember where I saw this linked, and it’s not safe for work! Erotic art for Alice in Wonderland by comics artist Frank Brunner.
:: I wonder if something like this will make it into Guy Gavriel Kay’s upcoming fantasy-China novel Under Heaven: ninth century China was a pretty formal place, with form letters of apology for drunkenness.
:: Wow. Just…wow. There’s some serious crazy! But at least the 101st Fighting Keyboard Commandoes will now be able to do some virtual target practice.
More next week.
Just a few quick thoughts from some recent teevee viewing:
:: I understand why FOX had to do it, but geez, going from final three to the winner of Hell’s Kitchen in a single two-hour episode really seems rushed to me. In the past, the final two have had a two-hour show (or a two-parter) to themselves. (FOX’s scheduling bit the show in the arse — FOX runs the Major League Baseball playoffs, which are going on now, so it was either wrap HK up faster than usual, or have it go away for three weeks and then have the finale later on. They opted for the former, and I don’t blame them.)
:: The most recent episode of The Amazing Race had what had to be the most crushing defeat for a team in the show’s history. A team (a guy and his friend or brother, can’t recall which, who has Asperger’s) reaches the Pit Stop first — only to discover, minutes later, that they’ve lost one of their passports. This means they are no longer officially checked in, and have to go back onto the race course (which for this episode is in Cambodia) and look for the passport, find it, and then return to the Pit Stop. If they fail to get back before all other teams check in, they’re eliminated. They didn’t find the passport. Exit the team. Ouch.
(Oh, and so far, the show’s roadblocks and detours haven’t been as much fun as the more gonzo previous season, which had my two favorite tasks to date — the hauling of giant cheeses and the Austrian beer-hall pie throwing.
:: I’m enjoying Grey’s Anatomy as much as ever, although I do hope they introduce some new blood soon. The show’s ratings appear to be sliding, though. I’m not sure why.
:: I loved Jim and Pam’s wedding on The Office, but I wonder if the show isn’t reaching something of a tipping point. One of the show’s great strengths to me has been its believability, for the most part; it takes normal office dynamics and seemingly amps them up just a little, often for hilarious effect. Still, there have been moments in the show’s history that stood out as too unbelievable to swallow, and I’m seeing a trend of more of that kind of thing going on. Specifically, I hope the writers address the problem inherent in having Jim being an office manager where his wife works as a subordinate. Every company I’ve ever worked for had rules against this type of situation. We’ll see.
:: Thank God 30 Rock is back on, because that means there are two funny shows on NBC on Thursdays. Community and Parks and Recreation just don’t amuse me in the slightest, I’m sorry to say.
:: I’m noticing that, in watching reruns of The Family Guy, which The Daughter enjoys for some reason, the only times I really laugh invariably involve either Stewie or the talking dog. That’s it. Peter? Lois? The two older kids? They could vanish from the show. But Stewie and the talking dog really do amuse me with some of their antics and banter.
:: I still have yet to watch the first few episodes of House, Dollhouse, or Castle, which I hadn’t even realized had started already. Oops. I also want to look forward to 24 this year, but the way last season got started so strongly and then petered out in the last quarter of the season gives me pause. But then I’ll look into the eyes of FBI Agent Renee Walker again, and that’ll be that.
:: I renew my wish that Patrick Jane, on The Mentalist, would be completely wrong some time. I’m starting to get a bit bored by the show’s formula of unmasking the killer in Act IV, and then having Jane indicate that he figured it out way back in Act I. I also wish they’d quit having Jane be right at the expense of the wondrous-to-gaze-upon Agent Lisbon.
:: At The Store, some wonderfully benevolent soul has changed the teevees in our cafe from FOX News to the Food Network. That’s always a fine development.
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer