Boy met girl, music met film

Cameron Crowe, the shaggy-haired, music-lovin' director, is the master of one-liners. His movies are hit-or-miss, but even the most cringe worthy of his flicks are goldmines of movie quotes. Crowe hangs onto his rep as both a dialogue master and a music nerd with his latest opus, "Elizabethtown." \nWith "Elizabethtown," Crowe gives this romantic comedy a dark side -- Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) has just lost a major shoe company a substantial amount of money and his father has just died. Naturally, the time is ripe to meet a quirky blonde flight attendant named Claire (Kirsten Dunst). The movie itself is sweet, sometimes too sweet, but ultimately heartwarming. It has its slumps, but is ultimately more good than bad. \nThe film's soundtrack teeters dangerously close to being better than the movie, if only for the gut-wrenching ballad "It'll All Work Out," by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. After "Almost Famous," Crowe set a high bar for himself, but here, he does a great job of using music the way most directors use scenery. \nThe DVD package is nice, and that's all there is to say, really. There's a well-designed photo gallery and two different versions of the film's trailer, as well as two little making-of docs. "Training Wheels" is a kind of montage of on-the-set video clips set to music, and "Meet the Crew" is a collection of hand-held camera shots from the set, (set to music, once again, naturally, this is a Cameron Crowe movie, I keep telling you). The docs are nice, if only because it always seems like Crowe has so much fun making movies.\n But if you buy the DVD only for the extended version of "Rusty's Learning to Listen" video, your money will have been well spent. The original, short version in the body of the film is a hoot anyway -- it's a video with a construction worker and an exploding house designed to teach monstrous children to listen to their parents -- but the extended version reduced me to tears. Maybe I just like seeing houses blow up.\nThe film undoubtedly will catch a few rabid fans, but for the rest of us casual fans, the DVD may not really be necessary. DVD features are like icing on a cake, and here, there's not a lot of icing, but hey, a little is better than none.