Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love it, love it, love it!, 19 Mar 2007
Had to write a mini-review as the last one was so lukewarm...surely it deserves better?
Saw this film the other day and was instantly hooked by the low-profile, slow-burn wonderfulness of it. There are a lot of films where the soundtrack is kind of incidental, but in this one, the music goes with the story like a wink and a smile.
On the CD case it says "Music to drive and live by", and it absolutely is. The overall mood conjured up is a "big picture" one - the sort where you're driving, looking at the horizon and thinking about everything important in your life. The songs hit a perfect balance of thoughtful and uplifting and somehow you feel by the end of it that everything might just turn out okay. Not sure how it manages to sidestep treacly homespun cliche, but it does.
The Ryan Adams song is wistful and wry, Same In Any Language a hummable earworm that you'll be annoying people in queues with for weeks, Long Ride Home something to listen to if you've ever not appreciated someone enough, Let It All Hang Out is an earthy, relaxed track...but it's the overall mood created by the soundtrack that just STAYS with you. More than the sum of its parts,like the film, the CD restores your faith in the way that sometimes, in spite of everything, good things can come out of awful things.
So there. That evens things out a bit.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
moved to buy it from watching the film tonight, 19 Mar 2008
I don't think it matters what age you are. These songs fit the movie, fit life, not just mine, but I think anyone's. Life's a journey and never more so poignantly made than by this film. Doesn't matter if you don't get it to begin with - like the earlier reviewer said ... its a slow burn. You'll love it, I'm sure
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4 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing selection from such a revered music critic, 21 Aug 2006
Two films before this, Cameron Crowe made ALMOST FAMOUS, which is easily one of my Top 10 all-time movies. Not only is the story endearing, well-acted and well-told, but the selection of songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s is impeccable. But given that Crowe was a famous rock critic of that period, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised.
However the selection of tunes for ELIZABETHTOWN is very poor. Most are taken from the past five years, many of them completely unknown to me. Even the self-penned ditty by his wife Nancy Wilson doesn't compare with what she composed for ALMOST FAMOUS.
Some reviewers of the DVD have written that ELIZABETHTOWN looks like a string of pop videos -- almost implying that the tunes were chosen first, then the plot of the movie was constructed from the lyrics of those songs. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why the movie didn't succeed on anything like the level of ALMOST FAMOUS, or even the flawed VANILLA SKY -- the songs were just too feeble. Some of the versions chosen are bizarre -- why choose the Hollies' version of 'Jesus was a cross-maker' when the original by the composer of the tune (Judee Sill) is superior?
What worries me most about the selection is that the songs virtually all seem to be based on acoustic guitar strumming, and within a very narrow range at that. On VANILLA SKY there was at least one keyboards-based tune (an excellent song from Radiohead's KID A). I now question Crowe's taste, which I never did before.
The only merit of the soundtrack for me is that it summons forth memories of Kirsten Dunst, who, contrary to all my previous impressions, is gorgeous in this movie.
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~ Original Soundtrack
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DVD ~ Orlando Bloom
~ Nancy Wilson
~ Various Artists
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![Elizabethtown [DVD] [2005]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51F58W5DRPL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
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