Recently saw a couple of movies that I thought I’d put my two cents in on.

We watched Elizabethtown on DVD the other day at the house.  It was a little different than I expected, but it was really good.  The thirty second summary: On the same day Orland Bloom discovers that the shoe he designed for his company is a catastrophic failure to the tune of $972 million, he also finds out that his father died.  His mother and sister, who can’t handle it, send him to Kentucky to bring his father home to Oregon.  On the flight to Kentucky Bloom meets unusual flight attendant Kirsten Dunst.

The rest of the movie is a journey in gaining perspective on the things that really matter in life.  Bloom and Dunst have pretty good screen chemistry and I especially appreciate Dunst’s character and the job she did playing a character that is slightly odd without going overboard.  Definitely a good rental.  It strikes me as a less stellar “Life as a House,” which if you haven’t seen you absolutely need to soon.

The other movie is the new Cameron Diaz and James Marsden flick called “The Box.”  The 30 second summary on this one: Strange man shows up at Diaz and Marsden’s door with a box and weird offer.  Press the button on the box within the next 24 hours and you get $1 million, but someone in the world you don’t know will die.  Don’t press the button and nothing happens.  They press the button and badness ensues.

The Box is alright, but I would probably recommend this as a rent as opposed to something to see in the theater.  I feel like the primary message of the movie is the recalibrating of one’s moral compass to remember what is right at the most basic level.  Unfortunately, that message starts to get lost in a sea of other stuff going on in the movie.

There are undertones of either an alien invasion or godlike beings doing social psychological experiments on people.  There’s also an element of a thriller and the NSA doing mind control experiments on people.  For me, there were just too many different things going on at the same time and no clear message came through.  It just seemed like the movie had an identity crisis.

Two pretty decent movies, but I would definitely recommend Elizabethtown over the Box.