Hard. He Said Hard. Heh Heh.

Opened today's mail and found -- along with the obligatory solicitations from AARP -- the soundtrack for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the latest comedy from prolific filmmaker Judd Appatow (who's bidding to become the John Hughes of the first decade of the 21st century, apparently).



That's John C. Reilly, of course, as the made-up superstar title character. As the clip makes clear, Cox is an amalgam of all sorts of real life folks, and his story seems mostly to be an excuse for Appatow to do broad parodies of various pop cultural moments (Dewey meets Elvis, Dewey meets the Beatles, Dewey goes disco). And of course lots of dick jokes.

In any case, the soundtrack's not bad (Reilly does his own singing, for what it's worth) and as you can see, the title song's actually pretty good. Which shouldn't be a surprise, considering that it was co-written by power pop god Marshall Crenshaw. Makes sense -- if you want a flawless pastiche of Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, who else are you gonna call?