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Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

As a rule, I’m a Judd Apatow fan, and have been since I became aware of him in the mid 1990s as the writer of the summer camp comedy Heavyweights and a contributor to The Larry Sanders Show and The Critic. His career has taken off in the past few years as the director of Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin, and as the leader of an entourage that has started to spin off films of its own (like this summer’s Superbad.). But that’s not to say that everything his name is on is gold, and Walk Hard, which he co-wrote, takes a place on the discard pile, along with the Jim Carrey remake of Fun with Dick and Jane.



P.S. I Love You

In 1990, prior to The English Patient, Anthony Minghella made one of my favorite movies, Truly Madly Deeply, about a woman (Juliet Stevenson) whose refusal to carry on after the death of her husband (Alan Rickman) causes his ghost to return to her. It’s not a movie that a lot of people have seen, though anyone who has will likely be thinking of it during P.S. I Love You. The premise here is only faux supernatural: Widow Holly Kennedy (Hillary Swank) is guided through a year or mourning by letters from her late husband (Gerard Butler), who wrote them as he lay dying from a brain tumor in the knowledge that she would probably fall to pieces after he was gone. That may sound arrogant, but in reality what we’re talking about here is the perfect husband of all time, a guy who puts his wife’s well-being above his even from beyond the grave. Frankly, he’s perfect in just about every way, for which reason I hope my wife doesn’t see this movie—who needs to try to live up to this kind of a role model? Especially when he’s played by Gerard Butler, with his lilting Irish accent and more realistic physique than the muscle suit he wore in 300?





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