The Film
Some films take themselves way too seriously. This is not one of them. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story tells the life story of the greatest rock star who never lived. John C. Reilly (Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, Boogie Nights), plays the title role, from the first time he straps on his guitar as a 14-year-old at the high school talent show to his senior years living on the ranch and pushing Cox sausages. After many roles in the shadow of bigger comedic stars, Reilly shows he can carry the leading man role with aplomb, and he has the vocal chops to pull off the surprisingly enjoyable original music featured in the film.
Speaking of songs, the powerful title tune, penned by Marshall Crenshaw, will stick in your head for days, and other numbers, which range from rockabilly to crooner rock, to folk rock to country to punk successfully "walk the line" between parody and earnestness. I'd actually consider buying the soundtrack – it's that good.
The film itself, co-written and directed by Jake Kasdan and co-written and produced by zeitgeist wunderkind Judd Apatow (Superbad), zips through Cox's life at a brisk pace, with plenty of cheap shots around the singer's last name but quite a bit of genuine laugh-out-loud good humor. One scene that stands out is Dewey and his band's trip to India where they share meditation (and a bad acid trip) with the Beatles. The Beatles are perfectly cast, with the odd exception of Jack Black as Paul McCartney (although maybe this obvious miscast is actually part of the joke?). The casting has surprisingly few misfires, with SNL alums Tim Meadows and Chris Parnell (along with Matt Besser) turning in strong performances as Dewey's band-mates, Kristen Wiig as his first wife, and Jenna Fischer (The Office) as his second.
On the Blu-ray Disc, the film is presented in two versions, the theatrical cut (96 minutes) and the "Unbearably Long Self-Indulgent Director's Cut" (120 minutes). You'll find the selection of which version of the film to watch on Disc 1 in the "Special Features" section. Those extra 24 minutes include extended scenes and extended musical numbers, most of which don't appear even in the "deleted and extended scenes" section of the special features disc. The film works either way, but if you dig the original, then give the extended version a try – it'll give you an additional 24 minutes in the singer's rich and varied fake life.
For an alternate take on the film, see Joe Lozito's review.
The Picture
The film is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.4:1 in full 1080p resolution with AVC encoding. Although compression artifacts are negligible, the transfer does have some issues with color saturation (not enough of it) which gives the image a slightly washed out look at times. But as a brand new transfer of a brand new film, detail is preserved well, with every pock-mark and wrinkle on Reilly's face coming through in all its glory. Shadow details are presented well in darker scenes and live performance shots capture every facial expression of band and audience members alike. Even blown up on a large projection screen, the picture comes across pretty clean. Overall, it's a decent transfer though not of reference quality.
The Sound
Presented in Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (48 KHz/24-bit), the audio track exceeds the video in quality, which is important in a movie that relies as heavily on sound and music as this. Dialog also comes through clearly and articulately as do the sound effects and surround cues in such pivotal scenes as Dewey scaling a building in a diaper, high on PCP or accidentally slicing his brother in half with a machete. But primarily, it's about the music, and that sounds great on this lossless Dolby True HD mix.
The Extras
The main extras I was looking forward to checking out on the disc are the BD-Live elements. Walk Hard is one of the first Blu-ray titles to take advantage of the new interactive, web-based BD-Live feature which is currently available only on the Sony PlayStation 3 via a recent firmware upgrade. But it turns out, these were the least impressive of the wide variety of extras. The BD-Live elements comprised some movie trailers and three short standard definition clips of certified Coxologist Derek Stone (Bill Hader) discussing some of the finer points of three of Cox's songs.
The BD-Live clips were funny enough, but these and the movie trailers took much longer to download than I expected (over 5 minutes for a single HD trailer, via a cable modem connection to the Internet) and they downloaded sequentially (one needed to finish before the next began). In fact, when I first tried to download these BD-Live clips a week before the title's official street date, they failed completely (as you may have read about in my initial BD Live article). But after clearing the data cache on the PS3, the download times got better. Also, you only need to download the content once and the next time you go into the "BD Live" area on the disc, you can play back previously downloaded content immediately. It's still not perfect, but it is good to see that Blu-ray is finally catching up with the features that the failed HD-DVD format had since the beginning (namely interactivity and network access). And these features should only improve over time.
The rest of the features ranged from "in-character" interview segments such as "The Last Word with John Hodgman" and Dewey's "Cox Sausage" commercial complete with in-character out-takes to more traditional featurettes such as "The Making of Walk Hard" and "The Music of Walk Hard." In case the 2-hour director's cut isn't enough for you, you can watch full song performances, deleted and expanded scenes, botched and improvised lines and you can listen to the original song demos as performed by the song-writers. There is also the requisite self-indulgent commentary track (with Judd Apatow, Jake Kasdan, John C. Reilly and Lew Morton) available during the film. There is even a mockumentary (or a "cockumentary" as they call it) which interviews the male member of one of the extras (don't ask – it has to be seen to be appreciated, but apparently he was a bit of a dick).
In all, this 2-disc Blu-ray Disc set includes hours of entertainment with the film itself and all of the extras. Just leave yourself the better part of a weekend to get through it all.
Final Thoughts
Fictional comedic bio pics can be tricky. To be successful, they need to create compelling characters inhabiting real space and time, in some cases coexisting with actual historical figures. And when these characters are possessed of some skill (in this case, musical abilities), the real challenge is to imbue the star with this talent in a believable way, capturing the essence of the era (or eras) depicted, but with enough satire to remind the watcher that he or she is indeed watching a work of fiction. Or it just needs to be funny as shit. Walk Hard accomplishes both of these goals. The music is enjoyable, the performances are strong both in acting and musically, and the observations and situations will make you giggle and at times laugh out loud. The story is even touching in a slightly pathetic yet uplifting way.
As a Blu-ray Disc, Walk Hard also succeeds with top-notch audio and a decent video transfer plus an entire second disc crammed full of extras that actually hold up to repeated viewing and listening. For any fan of the actors, the writer/director or producer, or even a fan of music or of comedies in general, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story on Blu-ray Disc is a safe buy for your high definition movie library.
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