Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

[Gold Trumpet]

GT did you stay after the credits were over?

Naw, I had to be somewhere. What happened?

[cine]

Spoilers... I guess...

GT did you stay after the credits were over?

Naw, I had to be somewhere. What happened?

at the very end of the credits you hear another guy singing the Walk Hard song.. and you think, who the hell's that? then they show a black and white clip of "the Real Dewey Cox" and its reilly 'singing' on a stool real slow and quiet and the whole tone of the song is mellow. the idea obviously was that the real dewey cox wasn't even as glamorous as he's made to be in the movie. because of the different singing voice, you get a sense that the 'real' one was actually a little boring and so the hollywoodized version had to juice him  up a bit.

i thought it was worth pointing out because i felt it added that extra layer to really hit it home that this wasn't some ferrell knockoff, they really had crafted this to be a full fledged spoof of music biopics. that final shot with a boring black and white dewey cox from the 50's really blew my mind a little bit.

[Gold Trumpet]

It's a good idea, but I don't know what it would have changed. I can argue structure in a comedy all day long, but it doesn't matter as much because it's all so subjective. It still wouldn't have made the rest of the film funny for me.

[cine]

i know what you mean... i just think kasdan and apatow took a smarter approach to writing a spoof and that their efforts were far superior to anything ferrell and mckay have tried to do. so even if it looks like they're trying to emulate ferrell's work.. they've outshone him nonetheless.

[hedwig]

funniest movie of the year.

in the age of Scary/Epic/Date Movie and the upcoming shitfest Meet the Spartans... dewey cox is exactly what the world needed.

SPOILERS
the Don't Look Back interview and the animated beatles segment seriously had me crying with laughter. amazing.

[Ravi]

Walk Hard has Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-style gags where people say and do ridiculous things with a perfectly straight face, but it is less about those kind of jokes than about parodying the musical biopic genre.  The portentously foreshadowing dialogue, the dramatic incidents, the phases in Dewey's life, are the main targets of the film.  So the film is less dense with gags than it could have been, but that's how it should be.

Tim Meadows had some of the funniest lines in the film.

I love John C. Reilly, but his character was made to be a poor man's Will Ferrel only. Considering Ferrel's style of movie has become such a bad trend that has influenced other bad movies, replicating it doesn't seem like a good idea at all. Not even a better subject can really do much to solve the problems. All the jokes and nods to its own superficiality was too forced.

The scene with JCR in his underwear was Ferrellish, but Ferrell couldn't have pulled this role off.  JCR plays it with complete and utter sincerity, as if he doesn't know he's in a comedy.

It is a very funny movie throughout, but not quite the sum of its parts.

[grand theft sparrow]

Of the three Apatows this year, this was by far the weakest one.  I'm a sucker for stupid comedies with a little bit of a brains like this and I laughed my ass off through a lot of it but I was hoping for it to be legendary, and it just wasn't.  Too many lulls, probably the result of too many gags and having to reshape the movie to be reasonably coherent, if the trailer half-full of footage that didn't make the movie is any gauge.

I love John C. Reilly, but his character was made to be a poor man's Will Ferrel only. Considering Ferrel's style of movie has become such a bad trend that has influenced other bad movies, replicating it doesn't seem like a good idea at all. Not even a better subject can really do much to solve the problems. All the jokes and nods to its own superficiality was too forced.

The scene with JCR in his underwear was Ferrellish, but Ferrell couldn't have pulled this role off.  JCR plays it with complete and utter sincerity, as if he doesn't know he's in a comedy.

I'm kind of torn because, though Reilly was perfect in this role and better than Ferrell would have been, I couldn't help but think that if Ferrell had made this instead of Talladega Nights, I wouldn't be sick of him now. 

Tim Meadows had some of the funniest lines in the film.

He really is the best part of everything he's in.  If only he had better writers for the Ladies Man movie.

In a perfect world, Walk Hard would be as unfunny as it would ever get.  This, however, is not a perfect world and so, movies like the ones Hedwig mentioned two posts up bump this into the upper echelon of movie comedies by default. 

[©brad]

Walk Hard Backlash: Apatow's army gathers one evening...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNeOyax79k

[tpfkabi]

that pisses me off that there was a bit after the credits.
my friend actually alluded that there might be, but then the theatre turned on the lights and the attendants were looking at us with body language for us to get out.

i laughed pretty hard at times.
this is actually the first Apatow related thing i've seen.
i need to get around to seeing the other stuff.
oh wait, i did see Heavyweights on tv one time...

it looks like this film really bombed though.
any theories as to why?

[john]

it looks like this film really bombed though.
any theories as to why?

Superbad and Knocked Up were Apatow related comedies... but so was The TV Set, and audiences stayed far, far away from that.

His name certainly holds sway for a lot of discerning audiences bloggers, and magazine writers... but for most Friday night audiences, I think the biggest selling points of an Apatow comedy are dick jokes, dudes playing X-Box... and more dick jokes.

Walk Hard certainly had plenty of dick jokes, but for the average asshole, it was a comedy about something they probably didn't give a shit about in the first place... a fictional musician from forty-years ago.

Brian Wilson jokes don't go over so well as "do you know how I know your gay" with the myspace crowd.

There probably is an audience for this... and it'll probably find it on DVD.

[polkablues]

at the very end of the credits you hear another guy singing the Walk Hard song.. and you think, who the hell's that? then they show a black and white clip of "the Real Dewey Cox" and its reilly 'singing' on a stool real slow and quiet and the whole tone of the song is mellow. the idea obviously was that the real dewey cox wasn't even as glamorous as he's made to be in the movie. because of the different singing voice, you get a sense that the 'real' one was actually a little boring and so the hollywoodized version had to juice him  up a bit.

I was going to put this in the "stupidest thing you've ever heard someone say about a movie" thread, but I'll put it here instead.

When the bit at the end of the credits came up, with "The Actual Dewey Cox" on-screen, a guy on the other side of the theater (out of only a handful of people who stayed through the credits) said out loud, as utterly sincere and perplexed as a man can be, "Wait, there's an actual Dewey Cox?"

[tpfkabi]

it looks like this film really bombed though.
any theories as to why?

Walk Hard certainly had plenty of dick jokes, but for the average asshole, it was a comedy about something they probably didn't give a shit about in the first place... a fictional musician from forty-years ago.

that could be very well why.
i also wonder if the time of the year has something to do with it?
a lot of families go to films together at this time and this is definitely not a film for kids.
also having "cox" and "hard" in the title might have something to do with.
then again, 3 of the top 10 are R films.
it was a good gamble though.
you would think the popularity of Cash/Walk the Line and Apatow's success would make it golden.

[Sleepless]

Amazon is listing the DVD and Blu-Ray for April 8.

[Kal]

This was really funny. I was looking forward to it for a long time but just got to see it today.

It was a bit long though. I got distracted at some unfunny parts also and I think its cause it was way too long.

John C. Reilly is amazing in this. And I loved all the cameos, especially the Beatles and grownup dead brother Jonah Hill!

The songs also excellent. I'm downloading the soundtrack right now!