It Ain't Much, But It's All I've Got Left

MUSIC +++ FILM +++ SPORT +++ PHOTO +++ LINK +++ POORLY REASONED POLITICAL OPINION AND STUPID JOKE

FLM
"Hello. I'm Johnny Cash."

Okay, you caught me: I'm not Johnny Cash. Doesn't mean I can't get drunk on whiskey, pretend his death made me want to finally drop my steel drivin' hammer, and walk around the house alone, saying somberly, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."

That's about what watching Walk The Line will do for you. It'll make you wish that you were the man in black, even though Johnny himself clearly wanted to shed his skin at least half the time.

The flick has its flaws. Cash was a broad-shouldered country boy, not a cleft-lipped waif. But supposedly Cash himself had a hand in choosing Joaquin Phoenix to play him, and the actor brings genuine momentum and confusion to the role, along with a talent for lip-synching that allows us to make the leap of faith as much as can be expected (although every time Joaquin so much as touches a guitar, some girl's head in the audience mysteriously blocks our view.)

Overall, the film never quite lives up to the expectations you built when you saw the preview with Joaquin/Johnny pointing his guitar "bang!" like a gun on the Folsom Prison stage. And, because your early country and western stars only had so many paths they could travel, the plot reads like a knockoff of last year's Ray: hard country work, dead brother, stardom, pills, flashbacks, acceptance, resurrection.

But, along with a performance you never thought Reece Witherspoon could pull off, Walk The Line provides one thing no other film will.

It makes you walk around in your undies at one in the morning, clear your throat, and confess to your cat,

"Hello. I'm Johnny Cash."

SPRT
Okay, thank you, I know the Niners are terrible. That seemed to be the point, finally, of their game this week: to prove that, "on any given Sunday," the local squad can hang with a division leader -- or cave to a cellar dweller. But their latest collapse had the following upshots:

1) Jeremy Newberry has finally been told to go home and get fixed, meaning he'll get a couple of pieces of dried-out kitchen sponge surgically inserted between his knee bone and his other knee bone, as well as all his various shoulder bones, all of which have been smashed around and rearranged to rub on each other as much as possible.
1-A) Newberry's absence means that Eric Heitman shuffles over to center, leaving rookie draftee David Baas to enter the starting lineup at guard. With Adam Snyder and Justin Smiley performing reasonably well, Kwame Harris and poor coaching are now the only excuses for the Niners' miserable running game and atrocious pass protection.

2) Alex Smith finally gets to step in for Ken Dorsey. Between Dorsey and Smith, there's a good quarteback to be had: take Dorsey's calm leadership and check-down skills, and add Smith's arm and legs. Until that surgical graft is possible, we'll just have to take it on faith that Smith lacks only experience on his road to leadership.

In the meantime, the leftover quarterback -- the one with Smith's panicky glare and fumblitis and Dorsey's ridiculous lack of physical talent -- is now the worst player in history.

MR

QWTOFDY
"Show my head to the people; it is worth seeing."
-Last words of Georges Jacques Danton