walk the line

I'm a big Johnny Cash fan... have been ever since I finally got over hating my father's country music tastes, back in high school. Actually, since before then--I decided, self-servingly, that Johnny Cash wasn't "really" country--you know, wasn't like George Jones and them. (Wow. Self-delusion.) But the film WALK THE LINE is just, well, just nothing. It's one of the most clichéd films I've seen in a long time. Every scene is taken from other biopics, pretty much without alteration: the loving woman taking away her addict lover's drugs and him frantically searching; the shot of the abject, begging man coming to his senses and asking the woman for help (shot, as ever, over her shoulder and looking down on him); the stern and joyless father who doesn't understand the visionary son. (This last one was, I think, just spliced in from that KINSEY movie of a couple of years ago, which was essentially the same film.)

It's hard to maintain a positive attitude after returning to the snow and cold from ten days in Guanajuato, I guess. On the bright side, I got a batch of papers from those seniors who're reading David Brock, Rigoberta Menchú, et al., and although most were lacking to some degree, they were all promising and a few were just great. Nice to see.