Monday, April 03, 2006

I Walk the Line

As always, I'm way behind on my movie watching, so I just saw "I Walk the Line" for the first time over the weekend. I'd already added it to my Netflix queue, but Vanessa, my youngest daughter, decided to buy the DVD after seeing the movie in the theater, so it got bumped up in priority. I realize that my opinion doesn't matters all that much, but I'm probably one of the few people on the planet who came away from that movie both a little creeped out by the relationship between Johnny and June Carter Cash -- at least the way it was portrayed in the movie -- and confused about why Reese Witherspoon would win an Academy Award for her performance. I'm hoping that the real life relationship between Johnny and June was more like love and less like unhealthy obsession than Hollywood made it seem. I was the object of an unhealthy obsession back in my younger years -- one that took place in the world of musicians and performances a lot like the Cashes -- and all I can say is that having a married man get drunk and high and become self-destructive over you is nowhere near as flattering as it looks on screen. As for Reese Witherspoon's performance, it wasn't bad. Really, it wasn't. She did a pretty good job, in fact, but there wasn't one moment during that movie when I forgot that I was watching Reese Witherspoon pretending to be June Carter Cash. She never became June to me, and that means her performance fell a bit short of my personal standard for Oscar-winning performance. Of course, as I said before, I'm seriously behind in my movie-watching, so I have no idea what the competition was really like, although I have to say that just based on the trailers I've seen, it's very likely that Felicity Huffman would have won my vote. You know . . . if I'd been asked. Which I wasn't. So I guess I'll stop thinking about Reese and Joaquin and Johnny and June, and start thinking bout revising the opening scenes of my current Work in Progress so I can get this proposal to my editor -- which I really need to do soon.

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