HOLIDAY SNEAKS - ON THE SET - 90% smart, 10% silly - Arriving at a successful formula for screen spoofery is an art form. Meet Jake Kasdan, the man who cooked up the legend of 'Dewey Cox.'
The several hundred extras are supposed to look as if they are enjoying a pretty good concert, but they don't really have to act: The music is that good. John C. Reilly is on the stage of downtown's Variety Arts Theater and he and his 1950s-era band are belting out a Roy Orbison-style love ballad called "A Life Without You."
Dewey Cox, the charismatic singer Reilly plays in the film, has dedicated the song to his wife, and the lyrics and performance are emotionally convincing.
Darlin', you must believe
I could never leave
you if I tried
A life without you
is no life at all
As the song builds to its rousing climax, director Jake Kasdan's cameras sweep over the audience. The extras roar and Cox basks in the adulation. It feels exactly like a big, emotional highlight out of "Walk the Line" or any other modern musical biography -- "Ray," "La Bamba," take your pick.
And that, for a minute, is the point.
When Cox's romantic ballad is edited together by Kasdan several months later, the singer's harmonious declarations of fidelity will run smack against a hotel orgy with Cox and an explicitly naked roadie at its center.
The most perceptive and authentic satire is just 10% different from the real thing, and that's the narrow target Kasdan and Reilly's "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" is aiming for. While movie spoofs are as common these days as comic-book sequels, there's a marked distinction between "Walk Hard," which opens Dec. 21, and such broad parodies as "Epic Movie," "The Comebacks" and "Scary Movie."
While all spoof films naturally try to have fun and make moviegoers laugh, "Walk Hard" wants to be silly by being smart.
As constructed, "Walk Hard" is consciously self-important; it's as if its makers believe their movie is significant. "We are trying as hard as we can to make it look like a real American biopic," Kasdan says as Reilly prepares to run through "A Life Without You" one more time. "We will always say whenever we're stuck, 'What would they do in a real movie?' "
The movie has plenty of gross-out gags and visual pranks, but "Walk Hard" also is designed to send up subtle biographical filmmaking tropes, including incalculable narrative montages, repeated visits to rehab and having the lead actor play the central character over a preposterously long time span (Reilly starts playing Cox when the singer is just 14 years old).
