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Mrs. Hill went to the theater Friday night and saw Walk Hard on opening night.  A synopsis isn’t necessary, but the highlights for me were definitely the songs, especially “Life Without You”, “Dewey Cox Died”, the Marshall Crenshaw-composed “Walk Hard” and the cleverly suggestive “Let’s Duet”.  Kudos to John C. Reilly for being a genuinely great singer with a ringing high F#.  And Tim Meadows has some of the funniest material.

Also note: everybody in the world was in this movie, including people you have seen before in lots other things, but whose names you don’t know; and tons of other people with big names who have small parts.  Now, I am sure you’re wondering, “but, Dana, does it have Jackson Browne?”  Hell yes, it does.  It even has butterscotch blonde Fender Telecasters.  So, something for everybody, specifically me.

I don’t often eagerly await motion pictures, since I don’t generally go to the theater to see movies anyway.  But a film opening today has me excited.

Walk Hard stars one of my very favorite actors, John C. Reilly, in his first leading role, playing a character named Dewey Cox, a fictional legend of popular music, whose life and career trace a contour reminiscent of scores of rockers and country singers.  The film is apparently a humorous homage to music biopics from Walk the Line and Ray to The Buddy Holly Story.   John C. Reilly sings all the songs in the film, and from the excerpts I’ve heard, he is actually a talented singer.  And the songs, while presumably played for laughs, seem to be genuinely good compositions.  I heard a bit of a tune from the picture called “A Life Without You”, a Roy Orbison-inspired  ballad, and it is fantastic, and, had it been written in 1960 would undoubtedly been a number one hit record, even sung by John C. Reilly.

I encourage you to listen to this extended interview with Reilly and director Jake Kasdan from the December 3 edition of Fresh Air.  At about 24 minutes you can hear an excerpt of “A Life Without You”, and plenty of other music from the film throughout.

And, as an added bonus which I only just realized from looking at the IMDB entry for Walk Hard:  the movie also stars Jenna Fischer.

When I was a kid I saw a movie called Invasion U.S.A. with Chuck Norris, in which he shoots two Uzis in seemingly random fashion. It was so over-the-top, preying on Americans’ irrational fear of invading Soviet forces, that I am sure if I was fortunate enough to see it again today I would laugh throughout. At the time I saw it, however, I was terrified by the perilous situations depicted in the film. For instance, terrorists attach a bomb to the side of a school bus sitting in traffic. Back then I rode the school bus each day, so the scene struck a chord with me. A chord of fear. Thankfully, Chuck Norris saves the kids, and dispatches the terrorists with a witty one-liner (and their own bomb).

Fast forward over twenty years, and the Soviets no longer inspire fear in the hearts of Americans, in spite of their backsliding on democracy under Vladimir Putin. There are actual lunatic terrorists on the loose in places like Pakistan, but god forbid we make good on President Bush’s “you’re-either-with-us-or-you’re-with-the-terrorists” rhetoric and come down hard on Pervez Musharraf. I am all in favor of parachuting Chuck Norris into the mountains of Tora Bora and having him deal with Osama bin Laden in whatever manner he saw fit. I imagine it would look something like this, but possibly less swampy.

Still, that doesn’t seem to be a priority for Republican voters or political candidates. Rather, their enemy has suddenly become Mexico, as though we’ve rolled the clock back to 1846. I have a big problem with politicians exploiting people’s bigotry to win office, nevertheless, if they do it like Mick Huckabee does here, I can at least appreciate it as comedy:

From the New York Times:

TRENTON — Gov. Jon S. Corzine signed into law a measure repealing New Jersey’s death penalty on Monday, making the state the first in a generation to abolish capital punishment.

I sincerely hope more states will follow suit, and that Florida will some day be among those which do not practice state-sponsored murder.

For the record, reason number one to love New Jersey is this.

Over at his blog, Alex Ross has declared December 17 to be Worldwide Atonality Day, pointing out that a draft of a song entitled “Ich darf nicht dankend” from Schoenberg’s Zwei Lieder für Gesang und Klavier op. 14 was completed a hundred years ago today, “music in which conventional tonal harmonies grow exceedingly scarce”.

Debate over the use of the word “atonal” aside, this is an important occasion, as it marks a moment in which serious music took a final dramatic shift from an established harmonic structure that had dominated music for hundreds of years. After Schoenberg, composers of art music had a choice to make: would they follow Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School and try and create a new aural landscape which seemed to offer so much promise to those willing to do the work, or would they continue along the well-established path made by all the Romantics and their forebears, or even retreat a little? Obviously this is was a bid decision, and some composers–Stravinsky, for instance–tried a variety of styles.

As much as I know understanding of, and repeated exposure to atonal music rewards listeners, there is no doubt that Webern was profoundly wrong in his prediction that everyone would be whistling 12-tone pieces in the streets by the end of the 20th Century. That day, I predict, will never come, for the simple reason that people like big tunes. As I listen today to Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, which is beautiful in its own way, I wonder, has any tone-row ever compared in popularity to this work from 1924:

No. Wozzeck, premiered just a year later, is the better piece, but it is clear to me that, in the end, tonality has won, and always will win with audiences.