So I saw Walk The Line. It was really fucking crappy. Joaquin Phoenix did not look or sound anything like Johnny Cash at all and sucked so bad that sometimes I forgot the movie was supposed to be about Johnny Cash until someone called him "Mr. Cash" or "Johnny". The story was your standard rags-to-riches-to-addict story you've seen in every movie about a real person ever. DOES JOHNNY CASH BEAT HIS ADDICTION AND FIND HAPPINESS? YOU'LL HAVE TO FIND OUT! Spoiler: Yes. Yes, he does.
The movie is pretty depressing, because it's all about drugs and crying and cheating on your wife and shit, and you really get the impression that whoever this guy is that is loosely based on Johnny Cash was a real pussy douchebag, so really the movie is incredibly inaccurate right there because Johnny Cash was neither a pussy nor a douchebag. He cries a lot and he takes a lot of pills and his career starts when apparently he just randomly decides to play the guitar and start singing, even though at no point in the movie do they ever show him learning how to do either of those things.
There's a scene in a recording studio where Joaquin Phoenix absolutely destroys "Folsom Prison Blues" so bad it's like the people who made the movie hated the real Johnny Cash so much they wanted people who watched the movie to think he was possibly the worst singer ever. I mean it's bad. Like so bad it's how did this stay in the movie bad.
Not once in this movie did I think "Oh my God, Phoenix has totally become Johnny Cash!" at all. Mostly I was thinking "Why the fuck is that guy from Signs pretending he's Johnny Cash?" and hating him. Hating him so bad that I was staring at my TV intently, wishing I could kill Joaquin Phoenix with my eyes.
I know Ray Charles worked a lot with Jamie Foxx for Ray when they made that, and Johnny Cash was dead when they made Walk The Line, so Wa-Keen probably didn't get to spend any time with him, because if his performance is any indication he didn't have a fucking clue who the hell Johnny Cash was before he read the script. If I was Johnny Cash I would rise from my grave and smash as many liquor bottles over Joaquin Phoenix's head as I could before my undead arms got tired and then I would bust him in the nuts with a pool cue and finally choke him to death with a guitar string. Then I would feast on his brains, because I'd be Zombie Johnny Cash and I'd still be ten times cooler than Joaquin Phoenix, no matter how many black suits he wears.
This guy is so not Johnny Cash that in a couple of the singing parts it sounds like they had to electronically lower Phoenix's voice to try and get him to sound even a little bit like the real Cash. My girlfriend picked up on that too, and even she was laughing about it. You hear that, Joaquin Phoenix? Girls laugh at you. You're not a man.
Robert Patrick plays Johnny Cash's asshole father, and I was really hoping his arm would morph into a big spike Terminator 2: Judgement Day-style and impale Joaquin Phoenix during one of the like three hundred scenes where "Johnny Cash" gets drunk and embarasses his family. Either that, or maybe a scene where the real Johnny Cash shows up and fights the T-1000 with a guitar. Throw in a car chase and some singing, a scene where the real Johnny Cash throws Reese Witherspoon through a window and she lands headfirst in the windshield of a pickup truck the real Johnny Cash then douses in gasoline, lights on fire, and kicks off a cliff with his cowboy boots, and Walk The Line would have been so much better. Actually it might've been my favorite movie ever. Probably would have won that Best Picture Oscar, at least.
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