Elizabethtown and other movie thoughts.

Quotes from the movie:

Claire Colburn: Do you ever just think I’m fooling everybody?
Drew Baylor: You have no idea.

Claire Colburn: I think I’ve been asleep most of my life.
Drew Baylor: Me too.

Drew Baylor: I’ve just recently decided that the things we know aren’t black and white.

Claire Colburn: I’ve spent so much time thinking about all the answers to the problem, that I forget what the problem *actually* was.

Chuck Hasboro: Okay, it’s all about family bro.

Claire Colburn: I want you to get into the deep beautiful melancholy of everything that’s happened.

Claire Colburn: Sadness is easier because its surrender. I say make time to dance alone with one hand waving free.

Jessie Baylor: May your loss be met with a hurricane of love.

So I finally went to see Elizabethtown. I don’t know why I had put it off for so long.  I think I was hoping to go see it with someone else, but I got sick of waiting.  After meeting KM for lunch today, I thought I would just go.  I’m kinda glad I went alone.  I cried through the whole last part of the movie.  I think I definitely need to go see it again to fully understand why I cried.  Any comparison to Garden State ended after I watched this.  They both have male characters that lose a parent, go back to for the funeral and meet quirky girls.  That’s where the comparison really does end.  Garden State is an amazing movie, don’t get me wrong.  It’s one of my all time favorites.  But now Elizabethtown town will be also.  This was the story of the main character finding himself in a different way.  He wasn’t numb to the world and he didn’t carry around guilt with him, nor did he have a bad relationship with his parents.  He is what I think of as the "typical American", out to rule the world by entering the buisness world and making lots of money.  But in the end, he ends up learning that there is so much more to life then that.

My obsession with Orlando Bloom is quite unexplainable.  As a big a fan of the Lord of the Rings movies and even Pirates of the Carribean, my favorite characters are not the ones played by Orlando Bloom.  But some how after watching Kingdom of Heaven, I became a big fan.  And not just a fan…I can’t help but find him incredibly good looking.  I mean there are tons of other pretty boys out there so I’m not quite sure why it’s him that I like.  Anyway, this movie didn’t help in that crush going away.  He was good in the movie.  He did a pretty decent American accent though his British accent came across when he said certain words.  But overall, he made me feel his pain.  I can empathize with being considered a failure in the eyes of society.  And it’s crazy that it took something so huge like his father’s death to bring him out of his slump and for him to realize how much more there is to life then a job where you make rich people richer by selling things to the masses that they don’t necessarily need.  I feel like those are some things that I’ve already realized but now I’m waiting around for the next step.  Not sure what the next step is though.  For Drew, it was meeting a quirky girl who took the time to show him what more is out there.  I think I’m waiting for my Claire and the scariest thought in the world right now is thinking that I may never meet him.

I mentioned I cried in the movie, but I’ve already forgotten at which parts.  Definitely some of the family scenes where he meets his dad’s family again after years.  Again, I could empathize.  My dad comes from a huge family.  He has 6 brothers and 3 sisters.  And my relationship with that side of the family isn’t the same as with my mom’s side.  It’s very complicated, but I felt that connection with Drew when I saw those scenes.  And the whole last part of the movie…I had tears streaming down my face.  Again, not sure why.  I need to watch it again.  I think it was at seeing America through those eyes.  It’s a beautiful country with so many parts and so many stories and so much to see.  The hardest was seeing Drew at the Oklahoma City memorial…that definitely made me cry.  Oh and the whole part where he starts talking to his dad in the car…it’s as if he’s right there with him and he’s sharing his whole life story with him and he laughs and he cries….it was very touching.

You know, I’ve been to Elizabethtown the town before.  It was quite a few years ago, probably after college.  I went with my family to visit some friends.  I however don’t remember seeing anything in the town like they showed.

The movie was great.  It lived up to my expectations.  The ending was great!  The music was great!  I don’t know that I would say I would reccommend it to people though.  I can also see why people may not have liked it and can understand the bad reviews.  I think you either identify with it or you don’t.

One of the previews they showed before the movie was for Memoirs of a Geisha and it looks incredibly good Ziyi Zhang looks so beautiful in this movie…not that she’s not beautiful in all the movies that she’s done. I loved her in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero,  and even House of Flying Daggers, even though I wasn’t crazy about the movie.  But of course this movie is nothing like those.  There is no martial arts, no sword fights, no cool fight sequences and she plays a Japanese woma

n.  The previews looked good.  I’m also a big Ken Wantenabe fan ever since The Last Samuri.  He looks so good in thise one as well.

You know, I have to admit that until recently, I really didn’t know what a geisha was.  I always assumed they were synonymous with courtesan but have recently learned that geisha are not prostitutes.  They learn to sing, dance, do tea ceremonies, arrange flowers, and other "womenly" work to entertain. My the new things Iearn each day!

I also saw trailers for a new Jennifer Aniston movie called Rumor Has It and it actually looked really cute.  Derailed is also on my list of to see movies.  Jen Anniston seems to be this years Jude Law…she’s in like every freakin movie coming out.  Her and Jake Gyllenhaal.  My favorite of her’s will always be this movie called Camp Cucamonga, which I think was a made for TV movie from the late 80s which had all the "IT" TV kids in it at the time.  I love it! Total guilty pleasure.

So I also finally bought the Revenge of the Sith DVD.  Walmart only had the full screen edition on sale.  The wide screen was $5 more.  But they also had the wide screen one with a copy of The Story of Star Wars which is pretty much C3-PO and R2-D2 recapping the whole story from the other movies.  It was kinda cool to watch…it kinda summed it all up.  I’ve yet to watch the extras on the DVD which include deleted scenes.  I’ll have to do that tonight.  Last weekend when I went home, I watched most of the movie, but with the commentary on.  It’s actually really cool watching it that way.  I mean, you don’t get much of the movie or hear the dialogue of the movie, but you hear cool info about the movie from Lucas and some others.  It’s amazing how much of the movie is CGI.  In certain ways, I don’t want to know.  There are even scenes where the people aren’t real, like for example, when Count Dooku does a flip from one level to another.  Christopher Lee is way old and they didn’t use a body double either.  It’s all fake!  But they did a good job of it.  I know a lot of the Matrix movies are CGI as well like Neo fighting the 100 Smiths in Reloaded and if you look carefully, it’s actually quite obvious…more because of the texture of the clothes than anything else, but in Revenge, Lucas talks about how they worked hard to make everything that is CGI look real.  It’s sad to know that there will be no more of these movie.

I went to see Elizabethtown in the same theater where I used to go see the Star Wars movies when they were re-released and as always, I feel nostalgic when I go there.  I flash back to moments like HL chasing me down the parking lot, trying to get his lightsabre back! 🙂

This weekend….I have The Interpreter sitting here at my place from Netflix.  I’ll have to watch it.  There are a bunch of movies on my Netflix queue that I’m looking forward to seeing like Requim for a Dream and Donny Darko.  I’ve heard great things about both but have never seen either before.