My Secret Addiction

Tue, 12/11/2007 - 12:54pm by John J. Madonna

For several years, I suffered from addiction. My poison came not in a bottle, but in the form of biopics about musicians. The cheesier and made-for-TV-ier, the better, I felt. Sure Walk The Line and Ray honoured Johnny Cash’s and Ray Charles’s musical legacy while making them appear as three dimensional humans, but these movies didn’t do it for me. In fact, the past few years, Hollywood has left my addiction far from sated. But good news for me and everyone else with this disease (that’s right, CDC, addiction is a disease; live with it!) Jake Kasdan, son of U of M alum Larry Kasdan, has teamed up with Judd Apatow and filmed Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

When I watch a biopic, I need awkward lines of dialogue from characters oddly self-aware of the history being made around them like in The Buddy Holly Story (“Hey, Buddy, where’d you learn about overdubbin’.”) I want dramatizations of acid trips done in an utterly unrealistic fashion, like in The Beach Boys: An American Family. Oh, just thinking about Brian Wilson yelling “There’s a spider on my face!” still makes me lose it. And, please, the main character’s best friend, needs to be a rat, like Michael Jackson’s was (at least, according to The Jacksons: An American Dream.) I cut off watching bad biopics cold turkey last year when my addiction got too expensive (my Comcast promotion ran out, so VH1 Classic would have cost me, like, thirty bucks extra per month. No thanks.) As you can imagine, Dewey Cox comes as welcome news to me. It also incorporates another one of my favourite things about these movies: finding actors to portray famous people, no matter how much they don’t actually look the part.

With the talent in front of the camera, like dramatic actor cum comic force John C. Reilly in the titular role, I’m just hoping this isn’t an awful Scary Movie-style spoof, where each scene parodies directly famous scenes in other movies, rather than the overall themes of biopics. But given the talent behind the camera and Apatow’s hot streak (spanning Freaks and Geeks in ’99 to Knocked Up and Superbad today,) I’m hoping Dewey Cox will join with the likes of Spinal Tap and The Rutles in the realm of fictional rock superstardom.