Walk the Line

I'm not a big moviegoer, but I've been to two movies in the last two weeks. Last Saturday I took Dora to see Chicken Little while Lovett saw the new Harry Potter movie. Today, Zelda, Lovett, and I saw Walk the Line while Dora was painting a ceramic unicorn at a birthday party.

It was a pretty good movie. I'm not a big Reese Witherspoon fan, but she is cuter than June Carter was, so that helped. I have never seen Joaquin Phoenix in anything, but sometimes he was dead-on J.R. Cash. Shelby Lynne was good as J.R.'s mama. With her beehive 60's hairdo and eyeglasses she could have passed for Lurleen Wallace.

A couple of observations struck me during the movie, though:

• Is there a requirement that musician's biopics include a scene of the subject making a phone call from backstage during a show?
• And that they pass out on stage?
• And that they receive a dressing-room visit from the voluptuous young woman in the front row from the previous scene?
• And that the memory of a dead relative haunts them?

Flashbacks from my past include:

• Hearing the song Jackson. That song is one of the first musical memories I have. The phrase hotter than a pepper sprout doesn't escape your psyche easily.
  
• J.R. quotes Foghorn Leghorn in two scenes - Fortunately, I keep my feathers numbered for just such an emergency. It used to crack me up when I heard F.L. say that.
• The movie ended before J.R. and June got married, which preceded Cash's television show, one of my first TV memories. The Statler Brothers got their big break on Cash's show. Mr. and Mrs. DePaul were big Statler Brothers fans. They wrote a song about their experience entitled We Got Paid by Cash. On a trip home from Indianapolis in the summer of '75, several Statler Brothers albums that she hadn't seen in Alabama rode home in my mother's lap.
• Mama Bennett's father fell in a pile of burning leaves once, when he was in his seventies. He crawled back to the house and smeared a jar of Bama mayonnaise on his legs to soothe the burns. I never hear Ring of Fire without thinking of that. This incident may rear its head again in a future Ficcion piece. I'm just saying...
  

A lot of suggested adultery, drinking, and drug use (well, duh) was in the movie, but suprisingly (and thankfully), with the exception of one f-bomb and one passing reference to Elvis's preoccupation with female ..., er, ...parts, the language didn't burn my ears. But the music rocked.

This movie wins the Eggplant seal of approval, for what it's worth.