The closing credits roll on Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown to the sound of "I Can't Get Next to You," the Temptations song originally introduced as Drew's persistent ringtone, as he sat perched upon the infamous suicide bike. This would seem a poor choice of last impression (or as Drew might call it, "last look") to leave with the audience, as it reminds us of all that might have been had Drew's phone remained on silent.

We encourage you to take the credits of any bad movie as an opportunity not to stop the movie and throw your DVD player off a cliff, but to collect yourself and consider what you have just experienced. Consider the names scrolling up before you and ask yourself what they believed they were accomplishing here. Or, if your own name is one of them, consider sending a letter of apology to mail@welcometotheslowroll.com .

In the final analysis, Elizabethtown fails on many more levels than the casual viewer may ever notice; possibly, it can only be viewed successfully as a work of cutting edge surrealism. A dead man grins at his son from an open casket; while a daughter weeps over her father's death, her mother tap dances; with eerie obliviousness, Elizabethtownies reprise the same error (California vs. Oregon) no matter how many times they are corrected. As though in a dream, Drew observes but does not participate in the preternatural happenings around him. Then there is Claire's ability to bend time and space, and of course, meaningless stock footage.

In fact, the surrealist streak running through Elizabethtown from start to finish is the only consistent thing about it. Otherwise, there is nothing meaningful to be gained from the film other than the remarkable fact that Cameron Crowe has obviously never met an actual human being before, let alone anyone from a small town; the broad, adorable personalities on display in Elizabethtown suck the life out of scene after scene. Perhaps the only surprise about Crowe's Elizabethtownies is that they didn't pull up to the Brown Hotel for Mitch's memorial in stagecoaches, wasted on moonshine and shooting loaded muskets at the sky.

Perhaps the only matter with which it is truly impossible to achieve closure is the final 15 minutes of Elizabethtown, which play very much like hanging out with your annoying friend who thinks he knows everything about pop culture just because you've never heard of the Flying Burrito Brothers and he has. Except this friend has an Oscar and a $57 million budget, with which he plans to take you hostage on a phantom road trip instead of making an actual movie. The road trip sequence is so shockingly lazy and prescriptive, in fact, as to make us want to throw our own iPods into the Mississippi River with a handful of Mitch's ashes.

Almost Famous cast an inexplicable spell over the world, but one that can easily be broken just by watching the movie. It's not that a movie can't be cutesy, weightless, and great -- it's that this particular movie only bothers to phone in the first two. It takes a true story and makes it ring false. In terms of creative failure, you won't believe how much Almost Famous has in common with Elizabethtown.