Last night on the way home from an evening screening of the Dukes of Hazzard -- we had a long day, okay? We needed to see junk blow up -- Cinecultist got to thinking about what we liked about the original television show. It boils down to these three things:
1) That the Dukes never ever ever used the car doors. For some reason, the climbing in and out of the car windows, while being chased no less, was so incredibly anti-social and fascinating.
2) Sheriff Roscoe's pet basset hound, Flash. He talked to it. It was his best friend.
3) The theme song. Waylon Jennings and good sing-along fun. It was about as close to country music as you'd get in suburban Northern California.
The new movie with Johnny Knoxville, Jessica Simpson, Willie Nelson, Burt Reynolds and our boyfriend, Seann William Scott has all of these things in it, but we don't think we need to put a fine point on it: this movie is not good. It's really, really bad. Boring bad. Despite many scenes of car chases, flaming arrows shot at explosives and various lame sexual puns, we didn't blame those two people in our screening for leaving two-thirds of the way through.
There were a few bits we did like, moderately. Willie Nelson is a surprisingly good actor. He should find a Straight Story type of script directed by someone like David Lynch. The growing sexual disfunction of characters SWS plays. His Luke Duke wants to make love to his car, the General Lee. No seriously, he wants to have sex with the car. So weird, and so awesome at the same time. Johnny Knoxville's white suit and aviator glasses at the end was kinda a hot look for him.
If only there had been a way for the out-takes credit sequence to be the whole movie. You don't realize how much they really beat the living hell out of those orange cars in all of the action sequences and then there's a Willie Nelson version of the theme song over it. A perfect good ol' boy combination.
Posted by karen at August 11, 2005 9:01 AM