Walk Hard - The Dewey Cox Story (2007)

Let's just make lame jokes about the one good Hollywood biopic in years.

"Walk the Line" was a really excellent film, not marred by stupid irony or cynicism, about a tremendous American artist. It was awesome to finally see something about American culture that WASN'T cliched. Now we have this piece of garbage which thinks it's exposing the cliches of films like Walk the Line by just layering on cartoon violence and sex jokes. Really uncreative and depressingly sad. Kristen Wigg can behilarious on SNL too. These filmmakers aren't taking down something pretentious but making light of a film with real heart, not to mention the blues. July 26, 2008

I love COX!!!

OMG!! I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. In fact, I'm still laughing. Anyone who is familiar with pop culture should get all the little jokes and inuendo. Elvis the bully, the Beatles riff, the Brian Wilson drugged out days, Jerry Lee Lewis underage wife, the protest folk songs of the niave 60's, the comeback in the disco 70's. And the music? BRILLIANT! This is definitley a movie I will return to often.
July 15, 2008

If you like STUPID humor.....

This wasn't quite the movie I expected, however if you like dumb funny then this is a great flick for you. July 10, 2008

Exposes the Cliches Behind Fame

This film lampoons the formulas used in the biopics of so many famous pop singers to make their stars' lives appear sympathetic, mythic, and worthy of their musical enshrinement.

"Walk Hard" is intended to most closely parallel the Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line." However, it actually includes the similar story lines of any number of other famous singers, from Elvis to Bob Dylan to Jim Morrison and more. The life trajectories of all these icons of 20th century popular music have a lot in common, and "Walk Hard" picks up on all these common strains of excess and rationalized rottenness and shows how such tawdriness ultimately gets transformed into redeeming epiphany and inflated importance in the typical cinema biography.

I personally wasn't able to laugh much at this satire, certainly not in the same hearty way I laughed at the mock seriousness of "Spinal Tap." This movie just exposes the clichés with too much raw candor. It underscores the "déjà vu all over again" quality of our favorite singers' lives and deflates them in the process.

There's the cliché of the exaggeratedly troubled childhood that goads the star to overcome in adulthood. There's the cliché of the star's ensnarement into drug use, blamed on the star's cronies and the steepness of the rise to fame. There's the cliché of the first wife. With that poor haggard woman left standing in the middle of a messy kitchen and a circle of bawling children, the star strides off to fresh sexual conquests - cloaked in his conviction that "she just wasn't supportive." And on and on...

Whatever grace transforms their music fails to inform the personal lives of one star after another. This movie further makes one realize what a grinding chore it could be to know many of these individuals in real life. It makes one happy to be a stranger to them, to just have the best of them there in their recordings and to be able to leave the rest.

John C. Reilly does a great job portraying a singer with a homely, down-home combination of luck and grittiness. The songs, which are given special expanded space in the DVD bonus materials, are inventive and catchy. But overall, if you have ever looked for heroes in the pop world, for inspiring lives behind the inspiring music - this movie might make you realize how much more reason there is to cry than to laugh. July 6, 2008

"Help, It's A Bad Trip!" ~ A Not So "Beautiful Ride" Through The Mind And Music Of A Tormented Soul

The '07 release `Walk Hard' starring John C. Reilly as hard rocker Dewey Cox is a sometimes hilarious, but uneven parody that slowly loses it's inventive SNL like charm the further you move into the storyline becoming too repetitive and excessive by the time the credits roll by.

Positives:
- The sequence with Dewey in an ashram in India with the Beatles was excellent.
- The music is great.
- Jenna Fischer looked lovely.

Negatives:
- The orgy sequence was totally unnecessary.
- How many bathroom sinks do you have to rip off the wall before you finally realize it's not funny?
- Too long!

Bottom Line: Inane entertainment with hit and miss results. June 30, 2008

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