New Year's Eve with John C. Reilly and Kelly Macdonald

It's possible the programmers at the Dromana Drive-In realized they were scheduling a John C. Reilly double feature for one quarter of their New Year's Eve audience. However, they probably didn't notice they were also curating a Kelly Macdonald double feature.

However, I'm getting ahead of myself.

First of all: Happy 2019! It won't actually be the new year yet for most of you when I post this, but here in Australia, we're already nine-and-a-half hours into the last year of the decade.

Secondly, my family and I are spending five nights down on the Mornington Peninsula between the 29th and the 3rd. It's a long stretch of beach towns about an hour's drive from Melbourne, making it an ideal spot to feel like you're truly away from the city without having to drive for ages.

We had more or less this same holiday last year, and at that time, I had a desperate urge to scratch my vacation movie itch by going to the nearby Dromana Drive-In, about 15 minutes from where we were staying. Coco, my eventual #5 movie of the year, was one of the movies playing, and it seemed like the perfect beach holiday activity.

For whatever reason, we didn't do it. My wife must have seen my puppy dog eyes, but she didn't yield. Something about keeping the kids up too late, maybe. She did throw me a bone -- to extend the dog metaphor -- by taking our kids to the theater in nearby Sorrento for a viewing of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle on our last day. We all really enjoyed it and that worked as a compromise.

When my wife scheduled another beach holiday for the same area this year, I think she knew she couldn't avoid the drive-in for the second year in a row, and indeed, she didn't want to. So she leaned into it. Not only would we go to the drive-in, we'd spend our New Year's Eve there, with fireworks at midnight and live music leading up to the 9 p.m. start time, once it was finally dark enough to start showing a movie. Because of the extra benefits, the tickets were $50 a head for adults and $30 for kids. Yep, that's one quick way to spend $160 on New Year's Eve.

But we both sensed it would be fun to do something festive and celebratory to ring in the new year -- which was also ringing in the fifth birthday of my younger son, a January 1st baby. What's another $160 here and there?

At one point she'd made the case to me that we should hold our Grinch viewing, which occurred on December 23rd, for this very eventuality. As it turns out, we could have. One of the options on four separate screens was The Grinch and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which would have been half of a great double feature. But I took my older son to a Spider-Man critics screening in order to review it, and though he would have been happy to see it again, we had initially determined it might be a little too intense for the younger one when debating whether to take him along to that screening. (Even becoming a big boy at age five.) As we ended up finding out, this was the one pairing in the deckchair cinema venue, which did not involve the essential drive-in experience of sitting in our cars. Better to have our kids' first drive-in experience -- or the first they can remember anyway (we took my older son twice when he was an infant) -- be of the traditional variety.

Two of the other three options would have been Aquaman and Bohemian Rhapsody or Bumblebee and Mortal Engines. I've already seen Rhapsody and Engines, but that wouldn't have been the most relevant factor in rejecting those pairings. We aren't even taking the older one to movies like Aquaman just yet, although he turns nine this year and that will probably be a good time to start. All three of Aquaman, Bumblebee and Mortal Engines seem to be about that level of maturity. Plus, we're seeing Aquaman at a different outdoor venue at the end of January, as discussed in this post. And Bohemian Rhapsody? I have no idea what the kids would do with that one except be bored.

But Ralph Breaks the Internet and Holmes & Watson seemed to be a perfect fit for us. Ralph was the one I'd targeted way back when I learned its release date, and knew we might be on the peninsula at that time. And sure, Holmes & Watson might be a bit ribald, but we figured that at least the younger one would be asleep by its 11 o'clock start time (which ended up closer to 11:30). The older one is just getting into comedy and they both loved Elf, which also stars Will Ferrell, so no further debate was necessary.

We spent a lazy afternoon recovering from a hot day at the beach, so we weren't there when doors opened at 5:30 or 6. When we did arrive just before 7, we'd already yielded some of the prime viewing angles to our more proactive neighbors, who were expanding outward from their cars with all sorts of camping chairs and a cornucopia of picnic-related paraphernalia. But we did find a decent spot on the left side, which we quickly switched for a more centered option that was a row further back. At the time we selected the spot, it had nice breathing room and few obstructions.

By the time we returned to our car, after dinner in the 1950s diner on site and throwing around a football for a bit by the playground, the situation had become a lot more dire. We could no longer properly open the doors on one side, and large pickup trucks with people sitting in the bed, not to mention SUVs with their hatchbacks open, were now proving significant obstacles. The kids had wanted to sit in the front seat, but my wife and I quickly determined we had no vantage point on the screen at all when we were sunken into the back. Desperation was on the verge of setting in.

Even though we saw our $160 flashing before our eyes, we didn't panic. The key decisions? Moving our car back about six feet, to improve its angle of incline, and removing the headrests from the front seats. With the headrests gone, the kids could see the screen from the back seat, and my wife and I didn't need them for our own viewing comfort. We were kind of like bugs in a rug, and I made an effort never to shimmy out of the passenger side unless absolutely necessary, since I had to suck in my gut to do so. But we cracked our beers and chocolate milks and were ready for the movies to start.

It occurred to me fairly early on that John C. Reilly was in both of these movies. If it's not clear to you, he provides the voice of Ralph, as well as the voice, face and all the actions of John Watson. In the U.S. he wouldn't have had two movies released on the same day, since Ralph Breaks the Internet came out at Thanksgiving, but here it seemed as though Boxing Day was Reilly's day to strut.

But it wasn't until deep into the second movie that I noted Kelly Macdonald's role in both films, which was oddly similar in its comedic function. It took Holmes (or was it Watson?) saying to her character that he didn't understand anything she was saying to remind me of the fact that Macdonald is also in Ralph Breaks the Internet -- in a role where nobody understands what she's saying. Macdonald is Scottish, as you will remember from her breakout in Trainspotting, and she leans into her accent as Merida in the Pixar movie Brave. Merida makes an appearance in the famous (notorious?) Disney princesses scene in Ralph, and spews forth an indecipherable combination of Scottish brogue and vocabulary. One of the other princesses says they can't understand her because she's "from the other studio." As Holmes and Watson's housekeeper, her dialogue is easier to understand, until it becomes more working class near the end and Holmes (or was it Watson?) comments on it.

I expected to enjoy Ralph, and thought Holmes looked dreadful from the trailers -- plus it had a rare 0 Rotten Tomatoes score at one point, though that's now up to a hearty 8. In the end, though, I derived more enjoyment from the second movie than the first.

Holmes & Watson is clearly the least fruitful of the collaborations between Ferrell and Reilly, which is probably to be expected when Step Brothers is one of my favorite comedies of all time and Talladega Nights has some really funny moments. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that their line deliveries caused me to burst out laughing on a dozen occasions, if not more. It's perfect silly drive-in fodder (though by 1 a.m. I was desperate for it to be over, through no fault of its own). And though there are probably some things I wish my kids didn't hear -- neither of them fell asleep as we'd planned -- it was better than exposing them to action that was too intense. My older son and I laughed at the same stupid fart and vomit jokes, so that was nice.

Ralph Breaks the Internet produced very few laughs, and very few things that I thought were genuinely inspired, including its core emotional conflict. This is going to sound like sacrilege, but I'd take last year's similar The Emoji Movie over this any day. I think some people are conflating their affection for Wreck-It Ralph with this, but it's just not that good. And the extent to which Disney travels up its own ass in this movie -- with its use of the princesses, stormtroopers and other intellectual properties over which it now claims dominion -- really annoyed me.

Although I've rambled on at far too great of a length for you to read on either the last day of the old year or the first day of the new, I can't finish without telling you about the fireworks. With about two minutes to go before midnight they shut off the movies and replaced them with a clock counting down to zero. That was a relief, as part of me had thought they might just play the movies through the fireworks show, which would be counterintuitive but wouldn't really surprise me.

So we all piled out of the car, me in my socks, the kids in their pajamas, and counted down to both New Year's Day and my son's birthday. It was the first time my kids have been up at midnight on New Year's Eve, so that would have been fun enough itself.

But the fireworks ... oh the fireworks. They were shot off from a field just beyond the playground, so we were no more than a hundred yards away from them. I guess I expected a modest regional drive-in to give us a minute's worth of low-end pyrotechnics, and that would be good enough. These fireworks went on for six or seven minutes and included all variety of colorful explosions, some of which I'd never seen before. I thought I knew everything that fireworks technology had to offer, but had several welcome surprises in the offerings here. While my younger son covered his ears (NOT a great birthday present for him) and the older one looked on with a mixture of trepidation and awe, my wife and I ooh'd and ahh'd and both called it the best fireworks show we'd ever seen live or from this close. Right then and there our entry fee was justified.

We were all in bed by 2, and now I'm awake writing this.

And off we go for another year.

Dewey Cox, live and in concert

When I woke up yesterday morning, I couldn't have known I would finish my day at a Dewey Cox concert.

Yet these were the true facts of my Wednesday.

I had already been planning to hijack our normal Wednesday night routine of dinner followed by whatever shows on our DVR seemed to exert the greatest pull on our attentions. I was planning to ask my wife to be excused from our normal viewing schedule to fit in the final of three John Cassavetes movies for this month's Getting Acquainted, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I'd give her the option of watching it with me, but rather expected that I'd confine myself to the bedroom to watch it there myself.

Little did I know that the evening would be hijacked in an entirely unexpected and wonderful way that was wholly different from that.

At 6:16 p.m. I received this text from my friend: "Hey man, any chance you want to go see John C. Reilly performing as Dewey Cox with me tonight in Hollywood? I'm sitting on a ticket."

Now, as a husband, a father, and someone who is generally always tired from a day that involves a 50-mile commute round trip, my first instinct was to reject the offer. There were plenty of reasons to do so. If it weren't the uncertainty of how this offer would affect my role in my son's bedtime routine, or the fact that I'd be putting another couple dozen miles on my car, my mere exhaustion would have been reason enough.

But clearly I wanted to do it, having not seen this friend I like very much in about a year, so I simply read the text to my wife to gauge her reaction. No sooner had I finished reading it than she was basically ushering me out the door with a big smile on her face. "How often do you get an opportunity like that?" she asked. Since the show didn't begin until 9, no immediate ushering was needed, and it wouldn't even affect putting my son to bed, which was only 45 minutes off.

Seeing John C. Reilly performing live as the title character in 2007's Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story would have been incentive enough even for people who don't like the film, but who appreciate the actor in general and would love to see this little experiment in Andy Kaufman-style showmanship play itself out. As it happens, I love the film, as described in this post, which was meant to be the beginning of a series of reflections on unexpected gems under the banner "Overachievers." I haven't actually written another post in this series since then. (Two days later, I wrote a piece about The Terminal under a similar "Underachievers" banner, and haven't continued that series either.)

So at 8:45 I found myself outside a bar on Beverly called Bootleg, which is more properly in Silverlake or even Echo Park than Hollywood. I couldn't believe this was actually the place. The crowd outside was sparse, to say the least. As I waited for my friend to arrive with the tickets -- off to the side, since a sign discouraged gathering at the bar's entrance -- only a couple people trickled in here and there, and most of the time it was just myself and the bouncer.

When my friend arrived and we entered, I was struck by the intimacy of the space. I didn't see any signs which delineated the capacity, but I figured it could be no more than 200. Even though Walk Hard was not a huge hit and is now five years in the past, I expected that an appearance by Reilly as Cox could summon a much larger audience and fill a much bigger space. Of course, I was thrilled that it wouldn't and hadn't.

We met the other two in our party -- a woman I hadn't met, and a guy I'd met about seven years ago but hadn't seen since -- and the place started to fill up a bit. The reason there were only 37 people there when we first entered was that there was an opening act, Mike Andrews, whose appearance consumed nearly the first two hours of the evening, as it turned out. This was fine by me, as I was immediately under the spell of his ensemble, which grew to about six people at its largest. In fact, remind me that I'm going to look up this guy on itunes when I get home tonight. He has a cinematic connection as well, as Andrews mentioned working with Mira Nair on an upcoming movie (which must be either Words with Gods or The Reluctant Fundamentalist, her two upcoming credits on IMDB). His band's music did indeed have an Indian flare, and at various times reminded me of The Beatles, Phish and Donovan -- all bands I really like.

I'm glad I was genuinely grooving on the music, because otherwise the wait for Dewey Cox to come on stage might have been interminable. I could only imagine the frustration of those who didn't dig it, as the opener actually went on a ten-minute break before resuming, and the clock sailed past 10:30 and toward 11. I came to realize that Andrews was more properly the headliner, and Cox -- the star attraction -- was actually more of a guest doing a mini set. We'd already gotten to that point where each song figured to be the last one, when Andrews finally revealed that they still had three more songs. At least then we knew how soon Reilly would take the stage. And to reassure me that there was no great misunderstanding about what the evening had in store, at least I'd already seen him twice -- once to come out to the bar to get a quick drink (or maybe just make an inquiry of the bartender), and once when I went to the bathroom and saw him strumming his guitar around a certain corner. It was funny how open the venue's back was, how I basically could have just intruded right in on Reilly gathering his thoughts as he reviewed his upcoming songs. I was reminded of the fact that one of the things about the character is that he thinks about his whole life before he goes on stage, so in a way, you could say that's what Reilly was doing as he prepared.

Andrews didn't actually leave the stage at around 11:10 when it was finally Cox's turn -- to our surprise, Andrews' band was Dewey's band, at least for the purposes of this show. Changing the nature of their sound considerably, they welcomed Cox on stage with a roar from the crowd.

I'd wondered what incarnation of Cox from the movie we'd see. Probably not this one ...

... but I considered this one a real possibility:

Of course, the actual incarnation he chose made a lot more sense. If we were to believe that Cox was a real person -- the back story that was teased was that he had faked his own death and had instead been living by the Salton Sea for seven years, a fate worse than death for anyone who's been there -- then he would most certainly appear as the Fat Elvis version of Cox:

And in fact, this was the exact outfit he was wearing. On my two-year-old Blackberry 8530 with its shitty camera, this is how he looked last night:

Yes, that's really the best picture I have.

I'm glad to say that the man really committed. He danced around. He grooved. He sung his heart out. Yeah, he had to rely on a discreet little teleprompter at the front of the stage from time to time, but Reilly is a professional -- he never let it affect his stage presence. And he'd semi-memorized enough of his songs that only for one or two of them was he beholden to this crutch. Even the word "beholden" is unkind, because he never stumbled, never missed a word, and emoted exactly as the songs demanded.

I found myself wishing that I'd brushed up on the movie -- which I'd only seen once, despite my fervent desire for a second viewing -- but then again, how could I have? There was no way to know it would be necessary. Which meant I didn't have the kind of familiarity with the songs that a recent viewing would have given me.

But I was glad to see my recollections come rushing back. He played the title track as his second number, and in another song or two was on to "Let's Duet," the memorably raunchy-sounding love song that constantly reveals itself to be less raunchy than it originally appears. (Sample lyric: "In my dreams you're blowing me ... some kisses.")

Now, a side narrative that had been occupying me was whether we were going to get a guest appearance from any of the movie's other stars. If this were a road show -- which I seriously doubt it will become -- there would be little chance that anyone else would devote it the time or the energy other than Reilly himself (and his band, of course). But here in Los Angeles, it's easy to imagine someone popping over on a lark, since they live here anyway.

The someone we might be likely to see was Jenna Fischer, aka Pam from The Office. If you're considering Walk Hard to be a straight parody of Walk the Line, Fischer played June Carter Cash (Reese Witherspoon) to Reilly's Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix). "Let's Duet" was ostensibly sung by Fischer in the movie, so it was certainly conceivable that she'd make a cameo here. And since I've always loved Fischer, I was seriously hoping for it. In fact, early on in Andrews' set, I thought I'd seen her pass me in the crowd. I engineered a fake trip to the bathroom to confirm it, but it wasn't her.

And she didn't take the stage either. Instead, a woman named Angela Correa took the stage. There was a reason I said that Fischer had "ostensibly" sung the song -- it was because this woman Angela Correa had actually provided the vocals. Predictably, she knocked it out of the park here.

This incident illustrated one of the ways the evening verged on breaking down the wall between the character and reality. In order to explain why it was Correa on stage rather than "Darlene" (Fischer's character, who would be an ex-wife to Cox at this point), Cox told us that Darlene was tone deaf and that Correa had to stand off stage and sing any time she performed. So that was a plausible cover.

Reilly did refer to the film on a couple occasions -- "You don't know how it feels when your life story is a bomb" he said, paraphrasing -- but it was as though the film existed as a documentary of his life, not a fiction film. Another good cover there. At one point he actually asked the audience if anyone present had not seen the movie, and a man in the front row copped to it. He brought him up on stage and handed him a copy of the DVD, saying it's now available for "only $20." It was part of a running gag that Cox's reappearance on stage was motivated by a desperate need for money. In a great bit of theater, he actually extracted a twenty dollar bill from the guy, and as far as I can tell never gave it back to him. Damn, I would have paid that twenty bucks.

The comedic highlight was his encore, which he performed after running through the crowd, over the bar, around back and back on stage again, in another great bit of theater. (In fact, he jostled the table next to us as he went by, knocking a glass beer bottle to the ground and spilling beer on my friend.) This was the third song I was sure I recognized: "(Have You Heard the News) Dewey Cox Died." The three of us guys (the woman had mysteriously disappeared by this point) in my group laughed hysterically throughout this number, which is an impassioned imagination by the singer of the popular reaction to his death. Rarely has death been so funny.

After this encore, Cox/Reilly concluded what had been about a 30-minute set and left the stage for good this time. While that's brief by the standards of most musical acts, it's a rather impressive length for an out-of-shape 47-year-old actor who does not do this kind of thing for a living, and has not (to my knowledge) inhabited this character either on camera or off in about five years. During the final roar of applause and cheering, I felt dizzy with enjoyment.

As it turned out, we lingered for a lot longer afterward than I had expected to linger, especially given that I needed to be at work by 7 a.m. this morning. This was due in part to the fact that I recognized another person in the crowd, a friend of mine who I only see every couple years, but who plays a significant role in my marriage. You see, this guy -- an actor working in obscurity, but regularly enough to pay the bills -- appeared as Bob Crachett in the performance of A Christmas Carol where I met my wife. If this guy hadn't been in it, our mutual friend wouldn't have invited my wife and me (among others) to see it, and I never would have met her. So I'm quite fond of this guy, even though I see him rarely.

Anyway, talking with him and his girlfriend, and introducing them to my group, led to the aforementioned extended lingering. As various people in our extended group peeled off to use the bathroom, it prolonged the whole post-mortem socializing out of a polite deference to waiting for the most recently departed person to return before saying goodbye. The conversation flowed easily enough, but I was conscious of the fact that it was now after midnight.

But what lingering allowed me to do was go up to Reilly afterward and congratulate him on a great show. As the crowd thinned out, he appeared out in the area where we had all stood for the past three hours watching the show, and mingled with members of the band. No longer dressed as Dewey, he wore jeans, a light blue shirt and a hat that can best be described (by someone with my limited understanding of the different species of hat) as a tan-colored bowler. Given the intimacy of this show and the fact that he was essentially making himself available to the public, I felt no qualms about going up to him.

I tapped him on the shoulder and offered him my hand. I said "I just wanted to tell you that you did a great job, that was awesome." Or something similarly innocuous but not inane. Having a couple beers allowed me to sound less inane than I sometimes do in these situations.

To use an Australian term favored by my wife, he seemed really chuffed. "Oh, thanks a lot," he said. "I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for coming out." In fact, his words trailed behind me as I was walking away, almost as though he would have talked about it more if I'd wanted.

The best thing is something I haven't even told you about. Do you know how much this whole thing cost?

Ten bucks. Or, $13 with the convenience fee.

Here's hoping that $13 goes straight into Dewey's pocket, so maybe he can finally move out of that shitty mobile home on the edge of the Salton Sea.