I’ll just get this out here right away: I hated Office Space the first time I saw it. Hated it. Thought it was the biggest piece of shit, one-dimensional comedy I had seen in a long, long time. And I stuck by that opinion for many years, until one night my wife insisted we rent it because she had never seen it, and I, being the loving husband I am, obliged. And it turned out to be good. Really good. I could only surmise that the 103˚ fever I had when I watched it the first time tainted my viewing.

So now, after watching Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story this weekend while slogging through another miserable child-borne (most likely one of the hundreds Olivia works with, as Bea was in great shape) illness and finding it only half amusing, I wondered if another good movie was being ruined by a malevolent virus. Both Olivia and her folks enjoyed it, but to me, it seemed like John C. Reilly was doing a bad impersonation of every Will Ferrell character of the last three years. Besides that, the whole genre-hopping nature of Cox’s career brought more than passing comparisons to such cinematic clusterfucks as the Scary/Teen/Epic/Superhero Movie series; a whole lot of spoofing tied together with a minimal amount of actual writing. And the Temptations joke? Come on, really? All that work just for a cameo by a Motown group 90% of the audience wouldn’t recognize without the setup line?

Actually, fuck this cold: Walk Hard sucked ass.