She's not my wife Warden. I keep asking, but she keeps saying no.

Disclaimer: I knew absolutely nothing about Johnny Cash before I saw this movie.

Walk the Line is a lot of fun. But I'm going to take a pass on really talking about the movie much. I'll just point you towards Roger Ebert's review, which I wholeheartedly agree with. The only thing I'll add is: why does it always have to be the drugs? They've sabotaged so many brilliant people, it's almost cliche to see more stories with the same themes. But it's also true, so I can get over the cliche.

What I really want to talk about is a great moment early on in the movie. Johnny Cash has convinced a record producer to let him audition. He gets his band in there and they start playing a bad, tired gospel song. It only takes about two verses for the producer to cut Johnny off and send him on his way.

Johnny doesn't take this, and presses the guy for what's wrong. After a little back and forth the record guy delivers a great monolog. I don't remember it exactly, but it went something like this:

What's wrong is I don't believe it. Imagine that you only have one song to sing. You're beat up, in the gutter, about to die, and you have one song to sing for the world to remember you by. Do you really want to sing this tired old gospel song? Or is there something else, something that comes from you. That's what people want to hear, something you believe in your core. That's how you can save people.

Johnny then sings a song he believes, and in the process discovers the sound that would make him famous. It was my favorite moment of the movie.

And like most great moments in great movies, that one has stuck with me. I've been thinking about it all week, and about how that same concept applies to lots of things. It clearly works in music - a concept best displayed in covers. When Stevie Nicks sings Landslide it just sounds different then when the Dixie Chicks do. But it's not always the original artist. DHT recently covered the 80's Roxette hit Listen to your Heart. In listening to each of those side by side, for my money the DHT version is stronger - for no other reason than I believe it more.

This is also what makes for excellent live acts. Bands that I really enjoy seeing live all have a common theme - they really believe in their music and the live experience. Listening to them it doesn't feel like they're just going through the motions, that they're just playing the music. Most music out there isn't too difficult to reproduce, just look at all the cover bands floating around. What separates the stars is they believe, they're committed, they're engaged.

This isn't just the case in music though. Last week I had a really hard time explainging why Harry Potter didn't really grip me. I think this does that explanation for me. It's more diluted, since the movie is the product of many, many people as opposed to the small number of people in a band (Ozomatli being a notable exception...) but the key was that I don't think they really believed. And in tandem, I didn't belive.

Contrast that with The Lord of the Rings, movies which I consider the most aamazing cinematic achievement of my lifetime. Watching the documentaries on the special edition DVDs shows very clearly that everyone on that project was consumed by a singular vision and it showed on the screen. They believed in a very real way and that caused me, in the audience, to also believe.

This concept is that magical thing that separates good from great. When creators really care about what they're making, when they believe, they imbue it with a special quality. That power goes with the creation, transcending the time and space gap beteen the creator and the observers. The creation interacts with us on a different level, we connect with and are touched by the emotion of the artist.

Or, as they said in Chasing Amy:
I finally had something personal to say.

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