3. Elizabethtown - Cameron Crowe
Paramount PicturesThe decline of Cameron Crowe has been an odd one. Lauded by critics for his sweet yet undeniably cool romantic comedies like Say Anything... and Jerry Maguire, Crowe confused a lot of people with the bizarre but interesting Vanilla Sky, and then pushed his luck a bit too far with the resoundingly awful Elizabethtown, which pegs Kirsten Dunst as something of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and Orlando Bloom as the yawn-machine tasked with winning her over. What should have been rather inspired came across as merely pretentious and one-note. The biggest issues with Elizabethtown come firstly with its script (cliched and unbelievable and existing of nothing but people just wandering around making polite conversation), and then with the supposed chemistry between Miss Dunst and Mr. Bloom, in as much as there isn't any. At all. The fact that this is a romantic comedy of sorts aside, that's something that Crowe should have really insisted on getting right, given that it's the entire point of the picture. Why did Crowe think this was a good idea? What made him sit down and write it? Wasted effort.