Five days after opening and tanking last weekend, Aloha is already a withered flower, pressed between the pages of history — essentially dead and buried and conversationally a non-starter. I can’t imagine anyone at this stage having the slightest interest in director-writer Cameron Crowe having apologized yesterday (6.2) about his having miscast Emma Stone as Allison Ng, a fighter pilot said to be one-quarter Asian-Hawaiian…who cares? I was in Prague for the cycle and missed the whole thing, period. But I’m 100% committed to seeing it sometime tomorrow in Los Angeles. (I’m writing this on a JFK-to-LAX Virgin America flight, around 3:40 pm Pacific.) I’m in fact looking forward to what I presume will…okay, could feel like something more than a run-of-the-mill disaster. Disaster mixed with goofy tunes or mushrooms or mescaline, something seriously bent and over-the-cliff. I’m probably the last guy in the world who has an interest in seeing this thing, much less a sense of intrigue about it.
Where does this feeling come from? Why, from a 5.29 review by Film Drunk‘s Vince Mancini — easily the funniest I’ve read so far.
“I assumed Aloha must be some schmaltzy Elizabethtown nightmare,” Macini writes in paragraph #3, “but that was naive. Schmaltzy romcoms are simple, and studios like simple. They can sell simple. What they hate is something they don’t know how to sell, and sure enough, Aloha is the movie equivalent of a man in a donkey suit with a tree branch growing out of his forehead. I don’t know what the fuck this movie is. It feels like Cameron Crowe tried to make some Pynchonesque contemporary riff on Casablanca, then either or he or the studio chickened out halfway through and tried to turn it back into Jerry Maguire. But don’t confuse Aloha with hackwork, or assume it’s your average ordinary every day turd. It’s more like a mad scientist had 10 beakers bubbling, and instead of unlocking cold fusion, he blew up his lab and melted an ear.”
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