Elizabethtown, Camerone Crowe's much maligned latest film, opened the Chicago International Film Festival last Thursday night, and people were still talking about it on Sunday, and Monday, and Tuesday ... but not in a good way. Everyone I talked to who went to the opening night gala, at which Roger Ebert conducted extensive pre-screening on-stage interviews with Susan Sarandon and Cameron Crowe, seemed overwhelmed. A festival staffer – looking both ways to make sure no one was listening – told me that the interviews were part of the problem. "They're up there, talking for hours, about something we haven't even seen!" The same staffer told me that he hadn't seen the Toronto cut, but that the version that opened CIFF (which is presumably the cut that opens wide this Friday) felt long, draggy and aimless. "There are good ideas there," he said. "It just doesn't come together." He also confirmed that the infamous Susan Sarandon in the funeral parlor scene is still there; it is also, in his words, (still?) "uncomfortably tasteless."