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Whistle Stopper - Walk Hard - The Dewey Cox Story (Two-Disc Special Edition)
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List Price: $29.96
Our Price: $9.99
Your Save: $ 19.97 ( 67% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
Starring: John C. Reilly, Jenna Fischer, Raymond J. Barry, Margo Martindale, Kristen Wiig
Directed By: Jake Kasdan
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
Brand: Sony
EAN: 0043396250789
Format: AC-3
Label: Sony Pictures
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
Number Of Items: 2
Publisher: Sony Pictures
Region Code: 99
Release Date: 2008-04-08
Running Time: 216
Studio: Sony Pictures
Theatrical Release Date: 2007-12-21
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: I love COX!!!
Comment: OMG!! I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. In fact, I'm still laughing. Anyone who is familiar with pop culture should get all the little jokes and inuendo. Elvis the bully, the Beatles riff, the Brian Wilson drugged out days, Jerry Lee Lewis underage wife, the protest folk songs of the niave 60's, the comeback in the disco 70's. And the music? BRILLIANT! This is definitley a movie I will return to often.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you like STUPID humor.....
Comment: This wasn't quite the movie I expected, however if you like dumb funny then this is a great flick for you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Exposes the Cliches Behind Fame
Comment: This film lampoons the formulas used in the biopics of so many famous pop singers to make their stars' lives appear sympathetic, mythic, and worthy of their musical enshrinement.
"Walk Hard" is intended to most closely parallel the Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line." However, it actually includes the similar story lines of any number of other famous singers, from Elvis to Bob Dylan to Jim Morrison and more. The life trajectories of all these icons of 20th century popular music have a lot in common, and "Walk Hard" picks up on all these common strains of excess and rationalized rottenness and shows how such tawdriness ultimately gets transformed into redeeming epiphany and inflated importance in the typical cinema biography.
I personally wasn't able to laugh much at this satire, certainly not in the same hearty way I laughed at the mock seriousness of "Spinal Tap." This movie just exposes the clichés with too much raw candor. It underscores the "déjà vu all over again" quality of our favorite singers' lives and deflates them in the process.
There's the cliché of the exaggeratedly troubled childhood that goads the star to overcome in adulthood. There's the cliché of the star's ensnarement into drug use, blamed on the star's cronies and the steepness of the rise to fame. There's the cliché of the first wife. With that poor haggard woman left standing in the middle of a messy kitchen and a circle of bawling children, the star strides off to fresh sexual conquests - cloaked in his conviction that "she just wasn't supportive." And on and on...
Whatever grace transforms their music fails to inform the personal lives of one star after another. This movie further makes one realize what a grinding chore it could be to know many of these individuals in real life. It makes one happy to be a stranger to them, to just have the best of them there in their recordings and to be able to leave the rest.
John C. Reilly does a great job portraying a singer with a homely, down-home combination of luck and grittiness. The songs, which are given special expanded space in the DVD bonus materials, are inventive and catchy. But overall, if you have ever looked for heroes in the pop world, for inspiring lives behind the inspiring music - this movie might make you realize how much more reason there is to cry than to laugh.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Help, It's A Bad Trip!" ~ A Not So "Beautiful Ride" Through The Mind And Music Of A Tormented Soul
Comment: The '07 release `Walk Hard' starring John C. Reilly as hard rocker Dewey Cox is a sometimes hilarious, but uneven parody that slowly loses it's inventive SNL like charm the further you move into the storyline becoming too repetitive and excessive by the time the credits roll by.
Positives:
- The sequence with Dewey in an ashram in India with the Beatles was excellent.
- The music is great.
- Jenna Fischer looked lovely.
Negatives:
- The orgy sequence was totally unnecessary.
- How many bathroom sinks do you have to rip off the wall before you finally realize it's not funny?
- Too long!
Bottom Line: Inane entertainment with hit and miss results.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Reilly and great music scenes save film from disaster
Comment:
With the description of the film and story (mock rock bio) already covered, I won't go into that again.
What works in the film is John C. Reilly, absolutely pouring himself into the persona of Dewey in his many phases, and delivering some fine singing and playing in the expertly crafted musical scenes.
All these period pieces are done with wit (which is something the rest of the film could have used more of) and it is telling that they mostly involve people other than the director and scriptwriter.
Apatow, in all fairness, does his best work with the music sequences, but exhibits just an appalling lack of instinct when it comes to the pacing and content of many of the dramatic scenes, particularly the icky, badly done machete sequence with the boys. Often I would just want to yell 'cut already' as scenes would disintegrate into pointlessness.
The script has some of the worst constructed dialogue I've heard in a while.
The brother talking about how "there ain't nothing I won't do in this long, long life of mine" to hammer home that, sure, it won't be a very long life...I am sure at the script conference, such 'hip' weird sentences are terribly funny, but try to sit through them on film....
So why 4 stars? Because Reilly and company are a blast when they sing and play, and there are some good scenes that work, such as a roaring, lusty Harlem-style club where Dewey, being the token white, steps in for the singer and tears the place up.
This is where the film works, because it balances between Reilly and the writer's penchant for raunchy material. But way too much material is just too juvenile to fit with the gentler style of Reilly at his best.
This one could have been on the level of 'Spinal Tap' if the writing had taken a clue from the songwriting: like I said, real wit.
C.
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Editorial Reviews:
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One of the most iconic figures in rock history Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly) had it all: the women (over 411 served) the friends (Elvis The Beatles) and the rock 'n' roll lifestyle (a close and personal relationship with every pill and powder known to man). But most of all he had the music that transformed a dimwitted country boy into the greatest American rock star who never lived. A wild and wicked send-up of every musical biopic ever made WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY is gut-busting proof that when it comes to hard rocking living and laughing a hard man is good to find.System Requirements:Running Time: 216 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY/SATIRE Rating: UNRATED UPC: 043396250789 Manufacturer No: 25078
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