Elizabethtown

This film takes melodrama and turns it into an action film by having a nonstop series of Deep and Meaningful Moments. It’s worse than it sounds: It also stars Orlando Bloom, who, it turns out, is not so good in non-elf roles. Bloom is a glamorous sneaker designer whose father has just died. Thus, he must leave his glitzy West Coast world and go to Kentucky, where he meets the kind of ordinary people who’ve been hanging around studio back lots since It’s a Wonderful Life. Also, he spends a lot of time trading platitudes with Claire (Kirsten Dunst), a stewardess who’s so insufferable that everyone instantly loves her. If you like sweeping music and close-ups of people’s faces and forced, manipulative filmmaking that gives the audience no credit for being anything other than a mindless emotion-sponge, you’re sure to love this nails-on-a-blackboard portrayal of what it’s like to have feelings, and to feel those feelings in the way that people who feel things feel them.