British actor Orlando Bloom promotes "Elizabethtown" in Tokyo
© AFP/File Toshifumi KitamuraVENICE, Italy (AFP) - Crowe's sentimental comedy "Elizabethtown" is overlong at two hours and 13 minutes, but grows on you, mainly thanks to a rich soundtrack of American roots music.
The director of "Jerry Maguire" and "Vanilla Sky" uses tears and laughter to tell the story of a young sports shoe designer, Bloom, and an unexpected romance that develops with Clair, an irritatingly-optimistic air hostess played by Dunst, as he travels back to the Kentucky heartland for his father's funeral.
But it is music that really makes the film tick, as former Rolling Stones writer Crowe uses a non-stop soundtrack of what he refers to as the Great American Radio Station, to push it along.
Bloom, who recently starred in "Troy" opposite Brad Pitt, says Crowe played a lot of music on the set in order to strike the mood of "Elizabethtown". "He's got the music in his head. There's a rhythm to it all."
Bloom's character Drew Baylor, whose father's death leads to an encounter with extended family in the Kentucky town of the title, learns to purge his sorrow and love life again on a road trip back to the east coast with his father's ashes.
But the film's winning performance comes from Susan Sarandon, Drew's mother. Always unpopular with her in-laws, she tap dances and jokes her way into their hearts to the tune of "Moon River" at her husband's memorial bash in the film's best scene.
Audiences have to wait around 90 minutes to reach that part, something that contributed to some of the jeers at the end of the only movie at Venice that could be just as enjoyably experienced with your eyes closed.
Meanwhile Monica Bellucci, Matt Damon and Heath Ledger star in Gilliam's very free adaptation of fairytales by the Grimm brothers, whose "Red Riding Hood," "Hansel And Gretel" and "Rapunzel" have entralled children for 200 years.
Gilliam's all-action film has Damon and Ledger as the brothers, cynical Will and Jacob the dreamer, and Bellucci as an evil queen.
"It was a fantastic experience," Bellucci said in Venice, though the film kept her on her toes. "On the set, you couldn't follow the script, every morning everything could change and you had to be ready to improvise."
As a counterpoint to the head-over-heels pace of Gilliam's fairytale, Philippe Garrel's three-hour-long "Les Amants Reguliers" (The Regular Lovers) was the first of three French films in the race for the Golden Lion.
Garrel follows the trials and tribulations of a group of young people during the May 1968 student riots in Paris. Francois, impressively played by the director's son Louis Garrel, meets and falls in love with a young woman he meets in the riots, played by Clotilde Hesme.
The film received a lukewarm response from those who hadn't headed for the exits after too many lingering close-ups of impassive faces and a sometimes inaudible dialogue.
Garrel senior's film cost 1.5 million euros to make, but though he complained here of the difficulty of making films in France, he's found an interesting way of keeping the cost down.
"Happily I use my family to help me make my films, which allows me to economise," joked the director, whose father Maurice also appears in the credits.
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