Tuesday Night is Film Night is back again and tonight we are cashing in on a musical biopic, as we see if we can;
Walk The Line
So here we are watching a musical biopic of Johnny Cash, but does the fact that we are not fans of Johnny Cash or know many of his songs, apart from the obvious ones and we're not knowledgeable about his past matter?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Walk The Line stands out as a musical biopic that needs no history, no knowledge and no prejudice regarding your taste in music at all. In fact Walk The Line seems to be more of a love story that a biographical critique of the life of the aforementioned Mr Cash. It's his love of music and moreover his love for June Carter that are the main threads here.
Joaquin Phoenix pulls out all the stops playing the somewhat troubled John R. (Johnny) Cash, whilst Reece Witherspoon plays Country singing sensation; June Carter. Both actors are superb playing their requisite roles, it must be really hard to act as a singer and sing as well. It is a fact that Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon performed all of the songs themselves, without being dubbed. They also learned to play their instruments from scratch, which makes their respective performances just phenomenal.
As for the story, director James Mangold follows the life of Johhny Cash from the early days up to the late 1960's. Cash's life followed that of most artists in the Sixties with their sex, drink and drugs, along with the rock and roll. Phoenix really hits the spot when portraying the drug addled Cash, ad-libbing, apparently a lot of the scenes and doing so to great effect.
Reece Witherspoon is also a sheer delight to watch, she pulls off the cutesy Southern drawl of June Carter with her speaking and singing voice with a great deal of attention to the delivery. Mind you Joaquin Phoenix also manages to capture the subtle nuances of Cash's voice as well as his mannerisms.
If you're a fan of biographical musical movies then Walk The Line should be on your list of films to watch. As we alluded to a few short paragraphs ago, you do not need to be a fan of Johnny Cash to appreciate this biography of his life and music, it stands up on it's own as a tale of hard work, fame, success, failure and redemption, as all good biopic's should be.
Witherspoon and Phoenix are ably supported by solid supplementary cast, although the Elvis is a tad 'dodgy', apologies to Tyler Hilton, the actor who played Elvis, but he didn't hit the spot as the wannabee king of rock and roll, but that's the only really negative point in the whole film. Walk The Line is a decent movie, following the standard rock and roll story, but portraying it with a level of accuracy rarely seen in films of this type, but also showing the depth of the characters and the interactions of the main players with a high degree of seriousness, empathy and realism.
A delight to watch.
The scoring from TNiFN Towers doesn't necessarily reflect too well on the film, as certain members of the judging panel do not appreciate the film as much as others, but it still scores quite highly scoring;
TNiFN Rating 78%
Until next time, which will be our 199th film!
No comments:
Post a Comment