Walk Hard

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Shenan and I checked out the extended version of Walk Hard, which, unlike a lot of the so called unrated and extended editions of a lot of other comedies these days, this one is significantly expanded (by nearly a half hour) and changed. And I'm glad to say, the added material is an improvement. It's still no klassik (in no small part because Dewey Cox, as great as John C. Reilly is, just isn't a distinct enough comic character, and because Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan don't quite have the knack for the laff-a-minute style), but it stills bumps the movie up a bit in my book.

I was really pleased to see that the expanded segments didn't deal with the Walk the Line and Ray parody scenes (which are the low point of the movie for me... they hew too closely to the source) and instead involve the more wide ranging parodies (protest music, disco music, self indulgent drug music) and original sequences that aren't really specifically targeting anything and are more doing their own thing (an extended sequence of Dewey confronting his issues by talking to his reflection in the mirror, and his dead brother, and his dead father, and his inner child, and his dead mother, and his feminine side all at once is pretty amazing). That for me is when the movie really comes alive, when it's doing it's own thing rather than getting all Epic Movie and parroting scenes from other movies.