I watched Elizabethtown again tonight, with my sister. If you recall, the first time I watched it I was frustrated when I found myself the only person on the planet who liked the thing, revealing that I suffer unquestionably from blind hurtin' Cameron Crowe love. The second time around was worse.

Not the movie, of course. No, I ended up liking it even better, liking elements that I hadn't even noticed before. And again, I subjected myself to a kind of voluntary stoning when I began calling up old movie reviews of it, mostly negative, on the internet. It irks me with a fury when I have such a positive reaction to a movie and I meet someone who didn't. I saw the aforementioned The Illusionist with Mitch and Simone, and Mitch didn't admit to me until the next morning that he hated the movie. It was a good thing he waited, because I might have rashly severed a friendship I was so hopped up on a mad cinematic high leaving that theater. More likely I would have tried to argue him into conceding that he liked the movie. Political opinions are so much easier to change compared to someone's first reaction to a work of art. You'll never be able to talk me into The Lost World or The Hours.

Oh but lord I wish I could change opinions about Elizabethtown. So I spent a lot of time rereading the A.O. Scott review. A.O.'s my boy on nearly everything we see together, so he really stung me with this one. Thus I spent a lot of time tonight arguing with him, deconstructing his points, calling him ugly things. And ultimately we couldn't come to an agreement, and I had to reread his Almost Famous review so we'd be friends again. He writes this:

As a screenwriter, Mr. Crowe is an unmatched comic portraitist who rarely stoops to caricature, and as a director he has an extraordinary gift for drawing out rounded, complex performances even in supporting roles and for indicating the fine emotional shadings in the relationships among his characters. What other filmmaker is as devoted to the nuances of decency or as fascinated by the subtle and complicated ways people can be nice to one another?

I contend you could plant this neatly in a review of Elizabethtown and not be called out on inaccuracy. Maybe it's best for our relationship that I choose to remember just such a thing.

But I actually wanted to write tonight about the movie itself. It's a movie that's pretty infatuated with the power of a mix tape, which is probably what really kills it for some people. The first time I saw it that whole road trip montage actually embarrassed me a little, me and my insistence that a car ride and a good song can actually grant a rich emotional experience. I guess because that scenes didn't produce an emotional reaction in me at all, but it did summon a few personal memories and real recognition. This time it made me think of my generation and our mix tapes, and how mix tapes promise this singular mark of our personalities and we hope that they carry a unique piece of ourselves that will be recognized by the person we give them to. The fantasy is that it's an act of creation when it's really an expression of exhibitionism. What I mean is, just that, we want mix tapes to MEAN a lot, but the satisfaction of rearranging all these songs in a special order disguises the truth that all we're doing is rearranging and reordering stuff that ostensibly everyone has heard before, or has access to. It's a pretty unremarkable post-modern activity, and yet it seems like one of the few post-modern activities that has so much personal meaning for individuals. There's that new thing with mix tape exchanges in record stores and coffee shops, and what is the thrill in that, other than the possibility that you might discover a unique someone and they might discover you, via your careful decoration of mp3 files? How else would we even believe that, other than if we hadn't given ourselves over to pop culture and married it to our every life experience?

Besides the uncynical, everyone's-really-nice-inside romanticism of Cameron Crowe, I really respond to his films because he's one of the few people finding some kind of spirituality or meaning in a culture of endlessly recut, repasted, and recycled images and sounds. I mean, Jesus, that's why his soundtracks kick ass. That Almost Famous soundtrack is one of the best mix tapes I own, and that's due to my memory of the film, my memory of listening to the album, and to the songs plain in themselves. Is that effect too far self-indulgent for a neccessary definition of art? Probably. But as a post-modern day religion, it might be one of the best human experiences we've got.