The Fredösphere

We watched Walk the Line over the weekend.  Hoo boy, that was painful.  You watch Johnny Cash make a hash of his life, one foolish mistake at a time, and it feels like torture.  How fortunate we are to have performers like Cash, willing to live out in the public eye what for the rest of us must be merely thought experiments:  well, whaddaya know, a life of drugs, fornication, and lonely road trips punctuated by sycophantic crowds wouldn't be so great after all.

The wifeösphere observed that the movie does not fully explain the appeal of Cash to June Carter.  I would add that I didn't get Cash's appeal as a singer, although I hate to criticize Joaquin Phoenix or Reese Witherspoon, who obviously put a lot of talent and work into their roles.  Roger Ebert disagrees, calling the performances "dead-on."  Stephanie Zacharek at salon.com calls Phoenix's performance "a dream version of Cash" and says the man was too big to fit into one movie, which seems right.  Maybe Eberts' long-time fanboy relationship to Cash's music warped his judgment.

In retrospect, it seems improbable that Cash and Carter would tour with Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley; how did the stage manage to support all those titanic egos.  Waylon Payne is obviously having fun in his role as Lewis; the first shots of him at an upright piano, sweaty, manic-haired and limp-wristed, paint a complete picture of a decadent, narcissistic -- and huge -- talent.  (The actor, Waylon Payne, has lived his whole life marinated in the country music scene.)  Elvis, on the other hand, is a cartoon:  we see him on stage just a few seconds, and his experimental hip spasms have all the sex appeal of a pinned-down, vivisected frog reanimated by the current from a hand-cranked electric generator.  Shamefully, I know what I'm talking about, thanks to a 9th grade biology class.