Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown premiered to mostly lukewarm notices last month at the Toronto Film Festival. Leslie Felperin articulated the thoughts of many when she wrote, in Variety, that Crowe's latest was "too long" and complained that it "suffer[ed] from arch editing and a surfeit of whimsical subplots." She also noted an inescapable story similarity to Garden State; although nobody actually had the gall to claim that Crowe was stealing ideas from that great auteur Zach Braff, both films undeniably circle an emotionally distant young professional who returns to his hometown for a parent's funeral, where he accidentally falls in love and has to re-examine his priorities. Now Paramount has announced that Crowe has shaved 12 minutes off of the 135 minute cut of the film shown in Toronto. Crowe reportedly made the edits to retrain the focus on Orlando Bloom's character, but an apparently cringe-inducing scene, featuring Susan Sarandon hamming it up in a funeral parlor, hit the cutting room floor as well. That sounds like dangerous business; any film that once had a comic scene in a funeral parlor is probably working on a level that can't be improved much to begin with. You cut out such a disasterous element, and you risk releasing a merely mediocre film when you could have had a craptasterpiece.