IMAGINING THE POSSIBILITIESPlus Walk Hard is funny, in a way that's hard for me to be so I can enjoy other people being funny like that. The Anchorman-style opulent, ridiculous dialogue --
"Honey, I can't build you a candy house! The rain would melt it, it won't work."
"Not if it never rains!"
-- or the intentionally bad casting of the actors who cameo as famous people (I laughed out loud just at the reveal of who was playing Buddy Holly), or that the film found ways to make nudity funnier than it usually is, or how it looks genuinely great, nailing that Walk the Line polish. And that it sounds great, because there's genuine craft to the songwriting -- the songs have catchy hooks and heartfelt emotions even when the lyrics are double entendres (or single entendres) -- and to the singing, because Dewey Cox is played by John C. Reilly, who actually can sing.
Anyway. Good film, worth seeing. Too bad there won't be more of it.
Because here's a what-might-have-been inspired by Twitter chattery last night: if Walk Hard had been a hit, there'd've been the temptation to make a sequel, but the movie seems sequel-resistant. It's a life on film (and by the way, it finds a couple of funny ways to underline that at the very end). But the several songs written for Dewey Cox and the music videos done for some of them, they would've given a way: more songs.
Have the writers, Reilly and the backing band get together every once in a while and bang out a song, plus a low-ish-budget accompanying video, in the style of a certain era, anywhere from 1950s bubble-gum to 1990s Rage Against the Machine-style, and release it. Fill in another you-didn't-know-it-was-there gap in the musical history of Dewey Cox: his Seventies punk song! His Nineties grunge song! (Remember, even the deeply-Eighties Oingo Boingo started sounded a bit like Nirvana by 1994. Dewey Cox could've, too.) Dewey Cox's contribution to a big 1980s song soundtrack! Maybe not something like Beverly Hills Cop or Top Gun, but mmmmmmmmmaybe something like The Legend of Billie Jean. (Oh, God: I just imagined Dewey Cox guest-guitaring for Toto on the score to Dune.) What about Dewey Cox's ABBA tribute? His KISS tribute? His William Shatner tribute? (Nah; too easy.) What about him trying to sound like Brothers In Arms-era Dire Straits? Or him channeling Bjork? Or Kenny G? And there NEEDS to be a 1980s Dewey Cox song with a saxophone. But none will ever happen, because again, the film? Not a success. Oh, well.
Still, this is delightfully horrifying: what would've been Dewey Cox's "Kokomo"?
