To celebrate 100 years in the business, the Santikos Theater in Tomball is holding Tuesday night special screenings of some of the most random movies you can think of. It's their Centennial Celebration Film Series to honor cinema, America and there will be hot apple pie. Tonight, they will be screening the delightful dramedy Jerry Maguire, directed by Cameron Crowe. Crowe has been buzzing around quite a bit lately due to his much-hyped Pearl Jam documentary Pearl Jam 20, to be released this September.
Art Attack is happy to see Cameron Crowe back in action, as it's been almost six years since his last feature film. Of all the 20th century auteurs, Crowe has had such a religious following with such few movies; he has only directed six feature films in his prolific career. Of those six films, it's difficult to put them in order of best to worst... but we will anyway!
Here is our ranking order of Cameron Crowe classics.
6. Elizabethtown This should have been a good movie. It focused on a down-on-his-luck Orlando Bloom, who, about to commit suicide, finds out his father has passed away and must travel to Kentucky. He meets Kirsten Dunst, a kooky stewardess and his eventual love interest. The rest of the cast is stellar, including Alex Baldwin and Susan Sarandon. So what happened? Our theory: Do you recall the Zach Braff vehicle Garden State that came out just shy of a year prior to Elizabethtown and was the exact same movie? The depressed man-boy meets cutesy-girl-who-opens-his-world-up-to-new-possibilities was already done to death and it was already done to death by Crowe!
5. Almost Famous (We will probably get panned for this placement) Almost Famous is the semi-autobiographical story of when Cameron Crowe wrote as a teen for Rolling Stone. In the movie version, the young Patrick Fugit tours across the country with a stereotypical 1970s rock band to cover life on the road and learn a thing or two about people, idols and himself. Almost Famous has so many wonderful characters and memorable scenes. Who could forget a drugged-out Billy Crudup standing atop a house screaming, "I am a golden god!" and, of course, the tear-jerking "Tiny Dancer" bus scene. At times, however, the characters feel forced and the ending is gift-wrapped so tightly, it gets lost in all its pretty paper.
