9 January 2009
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)
The trailer for this movie made it seem stupid, but in terms of parody it really is step ahead of things like The Naked Gun and Airplane, though not quite as funny as they are. And Zucker invites being shit upon after An American Carol, while I would be more apt to praise the self-loathing sentimental pathos of Judd Apatow et al. as something more. 
But we all know movies about singers and bands are hard if the music isn’t good, and here it is so-so. At least “Walk Hard” sounds better than “Visiting Day.” It amounts to what “Weird Al” Yankovic might have come up with had he decided to do a retrospective Rock ‘n Roll compilation. You have good manifestations of Johnny Cash down on through the line, along with Paul Rudd doing something funny with his mouth. The difference between the 80′s-Zucker and the 00′s-Apatow is that the former had insanity met with seriously serious (“Mr. Poopy Pants!“) Cops & Robbers whereas the latter actually sentimentalizes his characters to the point of actual pathos. John C. Reilly isn’t just keeping a straight face, but rather, in the hushed words of Eugene, he’s… Acting! You should note that I’m not actually speaking about Judd Apatow or Zucker (Jerry?), but rather more in the sense of an Ops Center Clancy-type brand.
I also admire the relative restraint they had in repeating the line in various contexts “I just love Cox,” which when it did happen (and it did happen…often), it was usually not the punch line but as elegant as it could be and the throw away part of the gag. Roger Ebert wrote at the end of his review – and knowing how wry he is, the paragraph itself is probably a joke – how the scene on the telephone with the dangling penis in the upper right of the frame was the very manifestation of gratuitous nudity for him. I think he would be the first to admit that a movie about Cox would be lesser without any in it.