Netflix Weekend Wrap-Up #8

Previous installments: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7

After several very busy weeks, Marcie and finally had a chance to catch up with yet another missed 2005 release:

Walk the Line (2005) - At the Academy Awards earlier this year, host Jon Stewart made a joke about Walk the Line being the same film as the Ray Charles biopic Ray, only with white people. As it turns out, that joke is pretty reflective of reality. Although competently photographed and acted, this film was about as formulaic and by-the-numbers as any biopic about a famous musician. There was simply nothing special or interesting about this movie. Even worse, this film was directed with a sledgehammer. “Subtle” clearly is not a word in director James Mangold’s vocabulary. How many scenes do we need to see of Cash and his wife fighting accompanied by shots of their children crying to get the point that they were being less than ideal role models to their kids? OK, we get it! Bad parents=sad children. And gee whiz, do we really have to sit through another audition scene in which the prepared song doesn’t pass the audition but then the protagonist pulls an unrehearsed song from his memory and sings it with so much conviction that it leads to a record deal?! I realize that the script was probably more-or-less based on real events, but it’s the way those events were interpreted and portrayed that put them so far over the top and beyond believability.

On the plus side, the music was good (although I would have preferred that Joaquin Phoenix lip-sync to a professional vocalist, rather than attempt to do all the singing himself — admirable as his attempt was) and all performances were fairly strong. Otherwise, there was really nothing special about this one. My Netflix rating: 2 stars