You know how I know an Apatow movie is subpar? It takes me the better part of a day--wracking my brain and turning out my pockets in search of a ticket stub--to remember I saw it.
Somewhere director Jake Kasdan is weeping over Jason Reitman's Best Director nom for Juno, wishing he could be the Hollywood scion garnering accolades. But Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is thin gruel, and I say that liking John C. Reilly and having paid a mere two bucks for the privilege of seeing the musical biopic parody on the big screen.
Yes, the double entendre-laden lyrics and the random penis were amusing. Here's the problem: Pretty much the whole movie I found myself staring at Dewey quizzically, as the following thought popped unbidden into my head: "Why does Will Ferrell look so weird?" Then I'd catch myself. But you take my point.
Speaking of the clown prince of comedy, the 'Fesser and I finally caught up with Ferrell's 2006 bid for seriousness, Stranger Than Fiction. What a delightful little movie. It does for the SNL vet what P.T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love did for Adam Sandler and Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind did for Jim Carrey [at long last]. Plus, it's got Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Ah, Maggie Gyllenhaal. The only young actress out there who can belt out "Honesty" and sex up Tom freakin' Arnold--convincingly--in the same film. Here she plays semi-socialist baker Ana Pascal with a half-sleeve tattoo, an arched eyebrow, and a dimpled grin. Having withheld the percentage of her income tax that would support defense spending and corporate bailouts, she's being audited by IRS sad sack Harold Crick [Ferrell]. Who, among other things, has been plagued by his ability to hear the otherwise nondiegetic voice of the film's narrator. Turns out Harold just may be a character in the book that Emma Thompson's Karen Eiffel has been working on for 10 years. And now Eiffel's trying to off him.
Fiction is charming, silly, and sweet. It deftly deploys a clever G.U.I. to get inside Harold's constantly counting O.C.D. mindset, artfully engages with its Chicago setting, and introduces a whole new generation to Wreckless Eric. [Screw Kimya Dawson.] What more could you want?
Director Marc Forster even manages to curb some of Dustin Hoffman's worst instincts, which is a mitzvah. [Screenwriter Zach Helm was not so lucky.] The Hoff plays a college "lit-tra-chure" prof who helps Harold figure out which author might possess the mysterious voice he hears narrating his life and whether his story is a comedy or a tragedy. Basically, it's an appealing variant of his Huckabees persona, and he almost sells the erudite oddball. Almost.
But then the script stumbles. The 'Fesser and I laughed 'til the tears came when Hoffman's Professor Hilbert first tries to wriggle free of helping Harold. His reasons? "I'm teaching five courses, advising two doctoral candidates, and I'm the faculty lifeguard at the college pool," he explains while standing in a vast, plush office that would make Stanley Fish weep. Five courses and two grad students? Ha! A scholar of his alleged stature would have TAs and grad acolytes out the ass and give at most one or two oversubscribed lecture courses a semester. [The cinetrix just loves when screenwriters romanticize the academic life to assuage their own feelings of being sellout hacks. Boo hoo. It's not all boning pliant undergrads. You want to live on an academic's salary? Thought not.]
Fortunately, it's the film's only false step, and by the end we were tearing up until the laughs came.
