Director: Cameron Crowe
Year Released: 2005
Rating: 2.0
Noble disaster about a young man's learning to deal with his work-related embarrassment (designing a shoe that lost its parent company, a Nike-clone, a billion dollars) and the death of his father - when he goes to the Heartland to go to the funeral, he meets up with an impossibly forward airline attendant (Kirsten Dunst). Crowe's films generally tend to be all over the place in terms of story - they're like mix CDs, changing mood with each respective track - which works a lot of the time for him (Almost Famous, for example), but here it just feels like he's meandering. The final 'road trip' Orlando Bloom takes is one very long epilogue (that could have been part of another movie), the "Freebird" meets "Moon River" sequence is cringe-worthy and I still wonder whether or not Bloom is charismatic enough to play the lead role in a feature film. Crowe includes too many songs in this (many at 'opportune' times - "Learning to Fly" when Bloom and Dunst drive away from each other, "Wild Horses" when they fight) in order to give you an idea of what you're supposed to be feeling at any given moment, a tactic generally used by lesser directors for their MTV-produced teen projects.
