Elizabethtown

When a young man (Orlando Bloom) flies home to Kentucky to make funeral arrangements for his father, extended-family relations tangle his budding romance with a flight attendant (Kirsten Dunst). Writer-director Cameron Crowe wants nothing better than to give us a heartwarming good time, but his movie, for all its pleasant vibes, keeps hitting one clunky false note after another. The script seems fabricated out of random ideas without regard to how they might fit together, and Crowe resorts to a pop-rock soundtrack to supply emotional resonance for dialogue he never bothered to write. Even so, the movie has its occasional charms; we can’t help remembering some of Crowe’s other movies (Say Anything…, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, etc.) and hoping he’ll do it again.