10,000 B.C, Vantage Point, Semi-Pro: Getting My Toes Wet

For the last few months I’ve been involved in two things that have been destroying any chance to break free and blog: getting a new theatre company up off the ground called Theatre Unleashed – they actually made the mistake of voting me in as Artistic Director. I’m a democratic leader.

I’m certain as I continue to forage the paths of creative ways to present theatre to Los Angeles I will be blogging here. I will also put a link up to the President’s Blog and our own Theatre Unleashed blog shortly. It’s keeping me extremely busy, but it’s also giving me the opportunity to not only expand my own opportunities as an artist (i.e. actor, writer – in fact I’ve written my first stage play that will be performed for our first group of one acts in June) but to nurture other people’s art, which is almost just as exciting.

If my thoughts don’t always seem as precise as they have in the past it’s because I’ve had a stress induced headache for about two weeks now.

Oh! The second thing is a business I’m starting up, which I’m one third of the ownership and staff video editor. Unfortunately our Panasonic camera continues to fail us and we have to take it in for a third repair. Things are happening to this camera that have never happened to any camera of it’s kind. I am cursed when it comes to making money.

Stress.

So here I am finally blogging again, I’ve gotten the chance to see a film that has inspired me to write, but I won’t be writing about that in this blog. I feel it’s only fair to quickly take note of the rubbish I’ve managed to see since The Spiderwick Chronicles, which was quite good, and there’s a blog in the wings to finish about that.

“Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”

For all the innuendo in this musical biopic parody, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is really flaccid. I haven’t heard such an intense silence from an audience while watching a film since Schindler’s List. I admit when I first walked into the film I wanted to laugh and it took me a few moments of uncertain chuckling to realize that the film really wasn’t funny, after that I genuinely laughed twice.

Walk Hard tells the story of Dewey Cox who as a young boy is forced to live out the mock lives of Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, flipping back and forth depending on whenever the writers Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan want to make fun of Ray or Walk the Line. Instead of letting the essence of the musical biopic inspire Apatow and Kasdan they follow said stories so closely the movie itself doesn’t have any legs to stand on of its own. Even though it’s meant to mock these films, we know what’s going to happen to Dewey from scene one and the creators don’t have the fore site to deal with the subject of musical biopics in a creative way. So even the bits that could have worked are mired in the fact that Walk the Line was a pretty good movie and that Ray wasn’t bad either, and we already know the stories. We’re actually subjected to a scene straight out of Walk when Cox plays for the first time a song that he’s written, the joke being in the film that it hits the charts and causes a stir within moments of it’s recording. It sounds funny, right? But somehow it’s not. How would you like to watch a remake of Walk with Jake Gyllenhaal, or Psycho but with Vince Vaughn…? Here it’s John C. Reilly being asked to act out scenes that have already been acted out by other actors. It’s not creative nor inventive in the way it approaches its material. It lacks spirit and an interest in truly skewering the films that really deserve it. It’s a lazy comedy, repeating many of the jokes over and over again.