Elizabethtown (2005)
December 19, 2024 7:23 PM - Subscribe

During a hometown memorial for his Kentucky-born father, a young man begins an unexpected romance with a too-good-to-be-true stewardess.

Directed by Cameron Crowe (Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous)

Though the role had existed for a long long time, this movie brought us the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl (from a review by Nathan Rabin) in the form of Kirsten Dunst's Claire Colburn.
posted by kokaku (3 comments total)
 
Watched this a month or two ago. I liked Crowe’s earlier films, so I’m not sure why I held off seeing it when it came out. Imperfect casting, odd elements, various flaws… but it has a voice, and moments worth watching it for. Some movies are like a box of buttons tipped out on the table, where the colourful ones catch the eye; this is one.

Fascinating to learn that this was the origin of MPDG. I would have guessed a Zooey Deschanel vehicle. But Dunst’s role fits.
posted by rory at 11:26 PM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]


i was surprised nobody had posted it yet. i watched this repeatedly in 2006 while in a relationship with a Claire who had MPDG energy and haven't watched it since, until yesterday when i decided to rewatch. surprisingly, it holds up.
posted by kokaku at 1:23 AM on December 20, 2024


I find Crowe to be kind of an unpredictable mixed bag: Fast Times and Almost Famous are classics, and along with those Singles is the one of his I still rewatch regularly; Say Anything is fine - a great cast and a few great bits but it never grabbed me as much as it did everyone else. But then Jerry Maguire and especially Vanilla Sky left me cold, and w/ Elizabethtown coming right after V.S. and what with all the decidedly poor reviews it was getting, I had (and still have) no desire to see it. If anything I would see it for the role that germinated the MPDG moniker, mostly just b/c I think it's a description that is wildly over/mis-applied and I want to see if the baseline character I have in my head that I use for that comparison matches the original.
posted by Pedantzilla at 2:41 PM on December 20, 2024


« Older Special Event: The Mads Are Ba...   |  Star Trek: Lower Decks: The Ne... Newer »

You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments

poster