Cynical Cinema

Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a fascinating, totally new look at the war in Iraq, focused on a heavy metal band named Acrassicauda. The DVD comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films, and is well worth watching. Not just for heavy metal fans, or political watchers, or documentary afficionados. This movie is great for everyone. Frankly, I’m not a big fan of the music of Acrassicauda (whose name, in Arabic, is a type of venomous black scorpion). I just don’t dig that crazy super-heavy, unintelligible, screaming death metal. At the same time, I recognize the skills of their guitar player, and I think that musically these guys are terrific, given their circumstances.

And those circumstances are crazy. They began playing in Iraq, pouring their love of American heavy metal into their music, wearing shirts that, on the right day at the right time, could get them killed. Metallica, Iron Maiden, Slayer. These are not bands that are tolerated by the repressive Islamic fundamentalists over in those parts. In 2005, shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government, VICE magazine teamed up with Acrassicauda to put on a rock concert. The show was a huge success, a sell out, and a year later Suroosh Alvi, the founder of VICE magazine, teamed up with the head of VICE films, Eddy Moretti, to travel back to Baghdad and see what had happened to the band in the intervening year.

What they find is disturbing and sad. The band doesn’t practice. They didn’t mind practicing under the threat of sniper fire, bombs and murder. But onec their rehearsal space was actually bombed, how much practice were they going to get in anyway? The film becomes more a tale of survival than a tale of heavy metal headbanging awesomeness. One of the only films out there that focuses on the youth culture in Iraq, and how the war is affecting those people. This film started out, really, as a magazine article for VICE, which you get in the booklet that comes along with the DVD. And the film makers are clearly not hugely experienced with this kind of filming. Their love for the band and the guys in it is constantly apparent, and their zeal for their “crazy mission” keeps coming through again and again. It’s a little intrusive, frankly, when we want to hear about Iraq and the band and their story more than anything else.

And in this sense, Heavy Metal In Baghdad succeeds despite itself. The story is so amazing, and the window into this world in Iraq has rarely been seen. Not the heavy metal world as such, but rather the world of teenagers and young adults who love many parts of Western culture, who hated Saddam Hussein, who buy bootlegged Metallica records, and who are unable to stand alone on the streets at night for fear of being killed. This is the world these guys inhabit, and this is the world we get to see through their eyes. The film follows them as they are forced to flee as refugees to Damascus, and the more laid-back interviews with the band members there reveal some seriously thoughtful, intelligent people who just want to make their music. They understand the situation they are in, they don’t want to make political statements with their music (although sometimes they are forced to do so), they just want to bang their heads and rock hard.

The personable, charming nature of these guys is the driving force of the movie, and they prove to be very engaging, interesting documentary subjects. They are not the low-brow, dumb-ass metalheads many of us have come to believe are par for the course. And they are not the West-hating, prayer five times a day, war crying Iraqis that so many of us have seen in the media. Heavy Metal In Baghdad is not about the war, or about heavy metal, or about Iraqis or Americans or religion. It’s about people. And it’s amazing.

When I first told our music director that Alliance Films was going to send my a copy of Control to review for June 17th, I asked him if he would play a Joy Division song after this review, so that I could perhaps expand the minds of our classic rock listeners to a new kind of more obscure, but equally classic, rock music. His exact words were “there’s no way I’m putting that namby-pamby British sad-sack crap on CHEZ”. OK, maybe those weren’t his exact words, but he certainly said something along those lines. And this is the attitude many people have about this era of British music. The Smiths, The Buzzcocks, the Jam…they seem to make the bile rise in the throats of many hardcore rock afficionados, the way emo does today. But for the life of me, I can’t understand how anyone would love Nirvana and hate Joy Division. Or how they can talk at length about the merits of R.E.M. and down on The Jam.

But I think those people are in the minority, since Joy Division has become, since the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis, recognized the world over as one of the most influential and one of the greatest bands of the late 70s and early 80s. And it is Ian Curtis who is the focal point of Control, the biopic by music video director Anton Corbijn. This is Corbijn’s first effort at a feature film, and it is terrific. It was Corbijn who, as a photographer, took the iconic photo of Joy Division that has become the definitive portrait of the band in the years since the death of Curtis. He has a real sense of history, shooting much of the movie in the real locations. Sam Riley stars as the singer, and he walks out of the house in which the real Curtis lived, down the street to the real building where Curtis worked. Corbijn has an incredibly astute visual sense, and the streets of Manchester are as important to the story as is the band itself.

Riley gives what truly is a star turn in the film. While it appears he was chosen for the role primarily because of his uncanny resemblance to the real Ian Curtis, he becomes so much more than that. Riley was not really an actor before landing the role in this film, be was a singer. And it really is him singing the songs on stage with Joy Division. The actors playing the rest of the band are really playing the songs. Riley has managed to mimic Curtis’ actual stage movements so precisely and so convincingly that on occasion I leaned in closer to the screen, certain that I was seeing file footage of Joy Division in 1979, and not Riley in a movie in 2007. Also wonderful are Samantha Morton and Alexandra Maria Lara as his wife and girlfriend respectively, the two women who (unintentionally, it would seem) tore his world apart. In fact, I think the very best thing about this film is the casting. This movie is perfectly cast all around.

Not only is Manchester a star of the movie, so too is the music of Joy Division, music which just gets better with every subsequent listen. As the movie goes on, the music itself tells a bit more of the story than we’re getting otherwise. And that’s because Ian Curtis was a man who lived through his music, who expressed himself in song and poetry and lyrics far better than he could in the real world, with words and conversation. (I have one bone to pick here though - “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, the definitive Joy Division song, appears too early. It’s a song about the conflict raging inside Curtis concerning the two women he loved, and the song appears in the movie before we really see that conflict appear. But it’s a small bone to pick.)

In many ways, Control is the best musical biopic of the last few years. Corbijn recognizes that it is impossible to tell the story of an entire life in just two hours without leaving some huge gaps. So he chooses to tell the story from the time Joy Division began through Ian Curtis being diagnosed with epilepsy, through his fits and his depression and his ups and downs, and finally through to his tragic suicide. There are still, of course, some giant gaps, but the streamlining of the biography helps Control avoid the bloated feel of movies like Ray and Walk The Line. And the fact that the music itself tells so much of the story is, I think, a luxury unique to this particular subject and this particular man. Very few singers in history have written such open, bare and honest songs about themselves, without being cryptic. Ian Curtis was not cryptic, he was not artsy for art’s sake, he was crying out for help through his music. Control is the story of the help that never came.

With the release of Control on DVD June 17th, there is a market for all things Joy Division, at least for a time. So Alliance Films is releasing a documentary film the same day, simply called Joy Division. Control is a fantastic film about Ian Curtis, the tragic lead singer of Joy Division in the late 70s and early 80s. And while it’s terrific in the way it focuses on Curtis himself, the rest of this powerful and influential band gets pushed aside in favour of the compelling story of their lead singer. Joy Division is the story of the rest of that band, and it’s more a celebration of the band’s history than it is a eulogy for Curtis himself. It features interviews with tons of the great movers and shakers in the Manchester music scene of the time.

Tony Wilson, the now-deceased founder of Factory records, is a big part of the film, and was an even bigger part of the scene in Manchester at the time. He’s the guy who broke Joy Division big in 1978, and was the subject of the terrific 2002 movie 24 Hour Party People. The other band members, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris make appearances here too, talking about their memories of fame and the beginnings of Joy Division, as well as reminiscing about Ian Curtis and his death. Of course, the three of them achieved far greater stardom than Curtis ever did. After his death, they would reform as New Order, and become internationally recognized pop stars.

But it was Joy Division that started it all. To be a little more accurate, the Buzzcocks really started it all in the late-70s Manchester scene, but Joy Division soon became the shining light of that group with the release of their first true album, Unknown Pleasures. That then paved the way for New Order, The Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, the Inspiral Carpets, and countless other Manchester bands who would all, at the very least, achieve a cult following the world over. But this film doesn’t deal with the legacy of Joy Division, just the moment in music history that was theirs and theirs alone. As the other band members remember Ian Curtis toward the end, you get some lines that were actually used in Control as well. No one, at the time, thought that Curtis’ lyrics were anything more than art. That he, like Neil Young or Bob Dylan, was singing about things that he created as an art form. It was only too late, however, that they discovered that when he sang lyrics like; Mother, I tried, please believe me
I’m doing the best that I can
I’m ashamed of the things
I’ve been put through
I’m ashamed of the person I am

on “Isolation”, he wasn’t just creating art, he really meant it. One of his bandmates calls Curtis’s story “one of the last true stories in pop”, and he is absolutely right.

The whole story of Joy Division in general IS one of the last true stories in popular music. And it’s laid out for us here in stark terms, with an eye to historic relevance and to the feel of the times and the city. The influences on Joy Division that came from the Buzzcocks and, more directly, the Sex Pistols. The brilliance of the music, the effect it had on people, and the legacy the band left in just two staggeringly brilliant albums. Also appearing as interview subjects are producer Martin Hannett and Curtis’ Belgian girlfriend Annik Honore. His wife, Debbie, does not appear in the film, but text shows up on the screen from her biography Touching From A Distance, so her presence is felt throughout the film.

A wonderful retrospective on one of the great unknown bands of our time, Joy Division is essential for lovers of British music, a wonderful companion DVD to those of you who are going to buy Control, and simply well worth watching for anyone else. A fascinating story about a fascinating time, place, and band. If you’re a music lover, pick it up.

Describing I’m Not There is a tall task. This movie is weird. It’s beyond weird. It’s bizarre and artistic and insane and bonkers and very, very, good. It is, in some way, the story of Bob Dylan. But it’s Bob Dylan as imagined by Todd Haynes, the director of some of the strangest, yet most powerful and subversive movies in cinema today. And this is another in his long string of great and successful yet incredibly strange and complex films Mr. Haynes has unleashed upon North America. Haynes has managed, with I’m Not There, to craft a movie the way Dylan himself writes a song. Enigmatic, purposefully cryptic, brilliant and defying explanation. I can’t begin to describe the bizarre scenes and the strange moments in this film. Just be warned, this is very much an art film, and you, the viewer, are not meant to understand it all. What I’m going to do here in this review is provide, as best I can, as a Dylan fanatic myself, a sort of guide to the film so that you might enjoy it simply by virtue of understanding it a little more. I hope it helps, because this movie really is terrific.

“Bob Dylan” is played by six extremely different actors, each of whom have a different name for the Dylan character. Christian Bale (American Psycho) plays Dylan as Jack Rollins, a singer-songwriter from the 30s whose most famous work was the song “Frosty The Snowman”. He also wrote Peter Cottontail and Smokey The Bear. A strange choice for one of Dylan’s personas, “Jack Rollins” is Dylan at the moment when his status as the leader of the folk movement begins to chafe on him and get under his skin. Richard Gere (Pretty Woman) plays Dylan as Billy The Kid in a movie. In the film Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, Dylan famously wrote the soundtrack, which featured the song “All Along The Watchtower”. This is Dylan’s period after his motorcycle accident where he disappeared completely for a few years. Ben Whishaw plays Dylan as Arthur Rimbaud, a French poet of what was called the “decadent movement” in the late 1800s. He was a brilliant young man, considered on a par with Shakespeare, when he gave up writing poetry altogether at the age of 21. He never wrote again until he died at age 37. Whishaw is barely used in the movie, playing Dylan at his most standoffish and cryptic.

More involved in the movie is Marcus Carl Franklin, a young African-American boy who plays Dylan as “Woody Guthrie”. Guthrie, for those who don’t know, was Dylan’s hero and greatest inspiration, and Franklin is terrific as the young Dylan who passed himself off as the second coming of Guthrie. This is Dylan the “fake”, and (I think) the fact that he is so young is a reference to Dylan’s young years, and the “fakery” of passing himself off as the next Guthrie. And I think the fact that he is black is a reference to the backlash against Dylan for involving himself with race relations and the civil rights movement when he was a white guy, the “fakery” of writing songs from a black perspective when he was not himself black. Heath Ledger, also with a big part in the movie, plays Dylan the Rock Star, as “Robbie Clark”, and I have no idea who Robbie Clark actually was. It may in fact not be a real name. Which is odd, since everyone else playing “Dylan” had the name of a real person, except for Ledger and Cate Blanchett.

And then…Cate Blanchett. This is a woman who has won an Oscar for playing Katherine Hepburn. A woman who has been nominated for at least one (and sometimes two) Oscars each year since playing Queen Elizabeth in 1998. And this, Bob Dylan, may well be remembered as the performance of her life. This is Blanchett at her very best, and possibly at the very best any actress can ever achieve. Becoming completely believable as a very famous man. Watching her doing the famous press conference after Dylan went electric in 1965, you actually forget that you are not watching Bob Dylan at that press conference. This is a magnificent performance, and must be seen to be believed. She plays Dylan as “Judy Quinn”, another name that seems to be pulled out of thin air. Perhaps this refers simply to the Dylan song Quinn The Eskimo, his most nonsensical, whimsical and completely devoid of message song ever. Because she plays him at his most whimsical and nonsensical. The scene where she appears, she is taking the stage at Newport, and plugging in the electric guitar in what would prove to be one of the most significant events in the history of music. From then on, she is the Dylan of the Don’t Look Back era, the one who had some sort of thing with Edie Sedgwick and who turned the Beatles on to the joys of marijuana.

Other characters pop up in the movie, some playing actual people, others playing actual people with different names. Here’s a short guide. David Cross appears as Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was a real person, a poet in the 60s and one of the major figures of the “beat generation”. Charlotte Gainsbourg is terrific as “Claire”, who is basically Dylan’s long-time wife Sara. Although for some reason she has a French accent. Don’t worry about that. Julianne Moore plays “Alice Fabian”, who is Joan Baez under a different name. Michelle Williams has never looked better than she does here as “Coco Rivington”, which is the name Haynes has given to Edie Sedgwick. Ritchie Havens shows up for a moment, but he doesn’t play anyone famous. I just thought it was cool he was in there. Also cool - Kris Kristofferson as the narrator. There is an enormous amount of cool in this film. But boy, is it tough to follow.

And then, there is Bruce Greenwood. Greenwood is likely best known as the bad guy in Double Jeopardy, or as Mitch Yost on that John From Cincinnatti TV show. In I’m Not There, he plays two characters. One is a fairly self-important yet intelligent BBC journalist who attempts to interview Dylan, when he is being played by Cate Blanchett. The other is Pat Garrett in the scene with Richard Gere as Billy The Kid as Dylan. Following so far? OK. This is now my opinion, and this may well not be what Todd Haynes intended in the movie, but I’m going to throw it out there. In the Pat Garrett scene, the idea is that Garrett is the only man who was able to understand, and therefore capture, Billy The Kid. And the fact that he is being played by the same actor as the British reporter indicates to me that the idea there is that this British reporter is the only one who really understands what Dylan is about underneath all the enigma and bluster. Or, at least, he is the one who comes closest, who hits closest to home, and thereby is the only one who traps Dylan, the way Pat Garrett trapped Billy The Kid. This is just my opinion, and in watching this film you may well come up with some other explanation. But I certainly do hope you watch this film.

Six terrific performances, especially that of Blanchett, and brilliant song after brilliant song would make any movie good. What makes this movie great is that it so wonderfully mirrors the work of the man it canonizes. No one, including Todd Haynes, truly understands Bob Dylan. Many would go so far as to say that list of people who don’t understand Bob Dylan includes Mr. Zimmerman himself. So attempting to explain him is an exercise in futility. The only alternative, if one wants to pay tribute to this man, is to craft a movie the way Dylan crafts a song. Haphazardly, with a big picture only you can see, and if people get it, great, if they don’t, that’s great too. The idea here isn’t to get I’m Not There. The idea is to watch it, let it happen to you, and let it pique your interest, and then watch it again. And again, and again, and again. This movie is absolutely terrific.

There is a conventional wisdom surrounding movies, music and art in general that states certain people are not cut out to make that art. Traditionally, those who suck at making movies and music and the rest of it are from two areas. Either the hard-core Republican-type right wingers, or the hard-core Christian evangelist types. Of course, very often these people are one and the same. Of course there are exceptions, and please don’t write in listing every one of those exceptions. I am aware of them. Alice Cooper, for example, is a Republican. One way to look at this is documentary movies - compare right-wing biased documentaries with left-wing biased documentaries. Michael Moore stuff, ant-war in Iraq stuff, pro-pot stuff. Now, name me one right-wing documentary you know of. Just one. GO ahead, name it. Well, they’ve been made, but they are not well done, and no one has heard of them. Perhaps the most famous is FahrenHype 9/11, a movie seen by fully 3 percent of the number of people who have seen Fahreheit 9/11.

Perhaps the man who proves this rule best, Republican-wise, is Jack Abramoff. As a movie producer in the 80s, he managed to get a neo-con, anti-commie, ridiculous film made. It was called Red Scorpion, and it starred Dolph Lundgren, and it was staggeringly bad. He followed this up with Red Scorpion 2, released in 1994. Then, he joined the George W. Bush team, and along with Tom DeLay, he managed to extort, steal, embezzle and misappropriate millions and millions of dollars from, among other groups, the native American tribes of the U.S. He also inspired dozens of jokes, both good ones and bad ones. If Abram helped you off a horse, would you help Jack Abramoff? And so forth.

And the Christians? Two words. Christian rock. Does that make you cringe just a little? Yeah, me too. Scott Stapp, why have you forsaken us? However, rules were made to be broken, and there is at least one Christian production team that does good work. They are called Big Idea Productions, and they are the fiercely pro-Christian, pro-God company behind the Veggie Tales. And you know what? They are good. In some cases, they are absolutely great! I grabbed the Veggie Tales series from Alliance Atlantis because our eight-year-old loves them. At first, I was awfully leery about this stuff - evangelical, pro-God songs? Christian values crammed into the faces of kids? It scared me a bit. Then I started watching. And I found myself laughing. Actually laughing. So much so that when the latest shipment of DVDs arrived, our 8-year-old was not even here, and I still opened them up and started watching them. By myself.

The double feature DVD is Very Silly Songs, and the Ultimate Silly Songs. Which is the best part of Veggie Tales. Their songs are very, very good. Although the wisdom of creating a 2-DVD package, each DVD being song-related, is debatable when there are five songs repeated from one disc to the next. Why bother? Couldn’t you fit all that on one disc, rather than making two? In the end, you get about fifteen songs. Which brings me to complaint number two. MY favourite Veggie Tales song is not on here! The one about the ball that was kicked into the tree, and it bounced in to the gated community? Hilarious. Gated community. Haha. There are still some comedic gems here though, that kids will love and adults will, hopefully, with an open mind, find quite amusing. Songs like I Love My Lips and The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything.

Yes, some of the Veggie Tales songs are preachy and irritating. But most of them are well done and not crazy God-centric, and those are very good. It proves that rules are made to be broken, and Christian producers can be just as good as atheist Golden Compass-type producers. Also out on DVD are actual Veggie Tales episodes such as Larry-Boy and the Rumour Weed, and Madame Blueberry, of which Madame Blueberry is the superior DVD. But the silly songs are the way to go. Christian movies can be good (the Ten Commandments), Christian music can be good (Handel’s Messiah) and Republicans can be cool too (Alice Cooper). I am leaving out Ted Nugent here, because although he has made some great music in his life, he is a class-one, Grade-A nutjob.

There are a few telling scenes in the new documentary Jonas: The Quest. One is where a woman describes the effect Jonas has on an audience. She says it’s very telling when you see a guy perform on stage, and look at the crowd. If the women are excited and turned on, and the men are not pissed off, then you have a really special act. This is probably true. Then she cites some examples of rockers who have been able to pull this off, starting with Jon Bon Jovi. What?

Jonas: The Quest is a documentary from Quebec being released by Alliance Atlantis on January 15th. It’s about a Quebecois rock star named Jonas, who is searching desperately for his big break. A lot of it rings true. I have never heard of Jonas. The movie explains that it is much easier for many French Canadian artists to get their break in the U.S. than it is in Canada. I believe that. How many French Canadian musicians can most of English Canada name? Celine Dion and Roch Voisine? Mitsou? Yeah. Not exactly a proud heritage there. But there are definitely many artists labouring in Quebec that never get the mainstream recognition they deserve. But I’m not sure Jonas is one of them. There are constant comparisons to Nickelback. That’s kind of telling as well. His band is good, his voice is good, but his songs are not exactly world beaters.

Jonas: The Quest is an interesting movie, especially for those who want a real inside look at the Canadian music business. But for anyone else, there isn’t much here. None of the personalities are huge enough to be engaging, and the music itself is mediocre. Would you watch a documentary about the undiscovered Coldplay? Especially if there was no real conclusion, none of the characters were interesting, nothing really happens from beginning to end, and you have to watch a lot of Coldplay songs? I would guess no.

Once is a film I watched yesterday, as my girlfriend lay around sick after she got home from work. I wanted to watch 12:08 East Of Bucharest, but she was not awake or feeling well enough to pay attention to subtitles. Which was fine. Once was in English. Only, once it began, I still needed to put on subtitles until I got used to the accents and the Irish brogue. Since most of the movie is music, the subtitles became fairly funny. There would be instrumental parts that still, apparently, needed subtitles, so the screen would say “note note”. Well, it would have little pictures of musical notes, but I can’t find that emoticon. I suppose this was for the hearing impaired who may watch the film. My advice here is that this film is NOT good for the hearing impaired. Most of it is music, and it’s the music that carries the movie. The main character is played by Glen Hansard, the vocalist and guitarist for the Irish rock group, The Flames.

The Flames must be very good, and I plan to pick up one of their albums to find out, because Hansard is fantastic in this movie. Not just as a musician and singer and songwriter, but as an actor as well. He is effortlessly charming, and totally believable as a man hurt by a former lover. His co-star, Marketa Irglova, is terrific also, and the chemistry between the two is palpable. Once is as simple as movies get. There is a connection between two people, they come together through music, and they do some stuff. That’s it. There really is nothing more to the film, and the songs aren’t Bob Dylan-earth-shattering material. But the songs are perfect for the film in that they are simple, they drive the story on their own, and the movie gives them plenty of time to be felt. Each of the songs in Once is very good, and each one is given it’s full three minutes of screen time, in what could easily have been cheesy Patrick-Swayze-on-the-beach-type 80s montages. But they aren’t. It’s the simplicity of the shots along with the simplicity of the music that works. There is one long tracking shot of Iglova walking down the street for four minutes while the song plays. And it really works.

The ending frustrated my girlfriend a bit, but then, so did the rest of the movie. I give her a pass on that one, she’s sick. The film is so full of goodwill, it’s so charming and heartwarming, that no healthy person could really hate it. For those of you who have seen Lost in Translation, Once is as close to that film in tone as any other. It is not as good, but few films are. It is funny, it’s sweet, and it’s immensely enjoyable without resorting to the big finale where they record an album and land a gig, and then the screen fades out as they play Wembley Stadium or anything pretentious like that. There is also none of that irritating will-they-or-won’t-they get together garbage that comes from sitcoms like Friends and such. It just is what it is, and what it is is terrific.

Across the Universe thinks it is very smart. And in some ways, it is. But in watching it, I was constantly aware of the smug sense of self-satisfaction the people involved obviously felt. The concept of the film is that it is a story that is told through Beatles’ songs. That’s about it. So what it ends up becoming is a loose and poorly connected collection of related stories, barely adequate acting, and some heavy-handed symbolism and satire. (Example: There is a sign painted on a wall in New York that says Cafe Huh? Get it? Example 2: They sing “Revolution”, and as they talk about pictures of Chairman Mao, lo and behold, there’s one on the wall. The rooftop concert. Remember when the Beatles did a…never mind.) The characters all have very convenient names for a movie with Beatles songs as its only means of conveying plot. There is a Lucy, a Jude, and Maxwell, Sadie, Prudence and Jojo. Jojo is convenient for the song Come Together, Lucy appears in a sky with diamonds, and Jude…well, obviously. For some reason, Maxwell never goes on a silver-hammer-aided rampage, and that disappointed me a little. I mean, he WAS sent to Vietnam.

In the end, Across the Universe ends up being nothing more than a series of music videos set to Beatles songs, with the occasional staggeringly cheesy my-first-video-editor-kit special effects. And yet, somehow, against all odds, it works. It should not work. I should not enjoy this movie. In fact, I kept kicking myself, over and over, every time I realized I was having a good time watching. Which, at the end of the two-hours-plus run time, left my non-kicking leg extremely bruised. I can’t explain it. I really don’t understand why it was good. It just was. Bono shows up as a guy in a cowboy hat and a handlebar mustache to lead a rousing rendition of I Am The Walrus. Eddie Izzard, as Mr. Kite, appears in a cartoon music video that looks as though it was shot by the Monty Python animation department. And Salma Hayek shows up in a nurse uniform to do backing vocals on Happiness is a Warm Gun.

In the end, the movie’s main failing is that it is WAY too long. This would have been a terrifically entertaining one-hour movie, but at more than two hours, it requires a commitment. Also, the best covers of the Beatles songs come near the beginning - a fantastic version of I Wanna Hold Your Hand, sung by a lovesick lesbian teenager, and a heartbreaking version of Let It Be set during a riot in Detroit. Also great is the take on Revolution. The only moment in the movie where you feel and see the song the way the Beatles intended. Song to skip: I Want You/She’s So Heavy. This is painful in that same heavy-handed sort of way. It’s a draft board, see, and Uncle Sam is singing I Want You…to join the army…and then the soldiers are singing She’s So Heavy while carrying…the Statue of Liberty. You want to scream at the television. Come ON! There are many other songs worth skipping as well. And the dialogue is dreadful. The guy at the unemployment line in England says “I was going to retire when I’m 64.” Get it? Or the explanation for the presence of Prudence in the apartment: “She came in through the bathroom window”. We GET IT. Now STOP.

I know, it seems like I’m ragging on this movie, and, in point of fact, I am. Nothing about it adds up. It should really be awful, and it IS awful. But somehow, it came together enough to entertain me reasonably for at least an hour. Get it? Came together? Whooo, I could have written this film. I don’t know how I could have written a more ambiguous review, but there it is. This movie is terrible. And you might just enjoy it.

John C. Reilly is a serious comedic talent.  Normally relegated to the Will Ferrell backburner in movies like Talladega Nights, he has been given a chance to star and to shine in Walk Hard:  The Dewey Cox Story.  And shine he does.  Reilly is easily the best part of this movie, with his understated performance meshing perfectly with the surprisingly understated movie.  As far as parodies go, the people who make all those Epic Movies and Date Movies and Meet The Spartans could take notes from flicks like this one.  Understatement is often far funnier than garish, over-the-top gross-out parody.  There are some terrific lines in Walk Hard, lines like “I’m chopped in half pretty bad here”, which would probably NOT be considered understated were we not inundated with the likes of Scary Movie Eleven and Epic Movie.

 The thing about Walk Hard is that it works on only one real level.  And that is, if you have already seen Walk The Line, the Johnny Cash biopic with Joaquin Phoenix.  If you missed that one, you will miss a lot of the hunour in Walk Hard.  The father’s constant refrain of “the wrong kid died”, the numerous occasions where sinks get destroyed, and the tumultuous relationships Dewey Cox has with various women.  And there are other references the movie makes which only the hardcore music-history and music-DVD fan would understand.  A Brian Wilson moment where Dewey is clearly losing his mind after too much acid, and asks for a twelve-thousand voice choir of Benedictine monks, or some such thing.  A Bob Dylan moment, which is a direct parody of a press conference Dylan gave in 1965 after going electric at Newport.  (That entire press conference, by the way, is available on a DVD called “Dylan Speaks”, and is a must for any Bob Dylan fanatic.)  But these are references the regular public wouldn’t get. 

The stuff they would understand is stuff about Elvis and Buddy Holly and the Beatles.  I think it is safe to assume that the general public, if they are even in passing familiar with this music, know that Elvis was the King, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and the Beatles went to India for spiritual guidance from the Maharishi.   But that’s about all there is for the casual observer, which might help to explain why this movie didn’t find a larger audience upon it’s release.  Oh, it did OK, but it is superior in many ways to those Will Ferrell movies that do gigantic bank every time they are released.  Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, Elf…Walk Hard is better than all of these, but just sadly inaccessible to many people.  The one thing though, I think, that everyone would be able to agree on is that the songs are terrific.  Every song sounding exactly like the era which it is meant to parody, every one hilarious and smart.  That might be the best way to determine if you will like this movie.  Listen to the soundtrack, and if it amuses you, so too will the film.