Tough Town: Filmmaker Cameron Crowe (Photo: Paramount Pictures)

The wheels appear to be coming off the Elizabethtown hype apparatus this week, with anyone who isn't paralyzed taking a swing at Cameron Crowe's latest piece of soundtrack-swaddled hackwork. The Reeler's interest naturally gravitated toward local boy Lloyd Grove, who wrote yesterday that he got a call from Crowe himself (twice!) refuting any rumored displeasure with Orlando Bloom's acting:

"I absolutely love Orlando's performance - I love everything he did," insisted the director of Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous and Vanilla Sky.

"I had high hopes for him, and he met my high hopes," Crowe continued. "I think what he has in his eyes and his face is the complete story of the character, in every scene he's in. He is a deeply soulful guy, and the way he portrays a character thinking about suicide is completely riveting to me."

Crowe said that in cutting 18 minutes from the film festival version - which my colleague Jack Mathews saw and rated "a big disappointment" - he has beefed up Bloom's presence.

"What I've done, really, is focus more on his performance," he said. "The movie is Orlando's journey. I'm really proud of the movie, and I love the whole process that brought us to this cut."

That "process"--which included bruising smackdowns and a perforated colon from scores of critics who suffered through E-Town's 135-minute Toronto cut--is illuminated in finer detail in both this week's Entertainment Weekly and a post today on JoBlo.com (via Cinematical). The JoBlo post indicates that Paramount is set to go with Crowe's 13-minute trim, which forsakes Susan Sarandon's "infamous" funeral home comedy routine in exchange for more of sweet, sensitive Orlando.

Entertainment Weekly, however, emphasizes that Crowe wields the last word and features Paramount president Gail Berman acknowledging she has little choice but to play ball with an underachieving final cut. Except in Hollywood, they call that "believing in the process" (in Berman's words). Either way, says Crowe--whose hero's-welcome return to E-town for the film's premiere is chronicled like something out of Triumph of the Will--the film tested well. Really! It did!

''This movie is definitely a populist film, not created for cynics,'' says the director, who insists that non-industry audiences have responded positively in test screenings. ''It's the nature of this one that it's tough to get all the pieces right. ... And you saying something is a 'work-in-progress' is like handing everybody a red pencil and saying, 'What are your notes?'''

Of course, Crowe is exactly right about this last bit, which only reconfirms the indirect equation of critics with cynics as the most transparent, loathsome act of self-defense filmmakers are capable of. I mean, was Vanilla Sky a misunderstood populist film as well? And at the core of their cold, black hearts, how cynical are those critics who have high expectations based on almost two decades of ejaculating over everything Crowe wrote and/or directed since Fast Times at Ridgemont High?

Oh, whatever. Maybe those recuts will make magic happen the way Egoyan's post-NC-17 lesbian sex additions made Where the Truth Lies worth my 90 minutes. Miracles happen every day.