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It's Sunday November the 20 around 2:00PM and

Get Rhythm, Man in Black

While everybody in the free world was seeing yet another Harry Potter film (don't get us started, we don't get the whole thing at all and no, we haven't read, watched, or even care about any of it.) Thankfully people still found time to go out and make "Walk The Line" the second biggest movie of the weekend, with over $22 million at the box office.

Pretty much every review of importance, save The New York Times A.O. Scott who suggests that it, "settles down in the fat middle of the bell curve, providing, if nothing else, an excuse to go out and buy some CD's", have fallen in love with this biopic love story of Johnny Cash and June Carter. And once you get used to Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon doing the singing - and you quite nearly do until the end credits - the movie is far superior to last year's overhyped "Ray." Maybe that's just because we like Cash's music more than Charles'.

One thing that could have been a movie in it's own right was the road tour of Cash along with Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Roy Orbison, and Waylon Jennings. That could be the greatest road movie of all time, and a timeless slice of American lore. Instead that storyine is scenery for what is a typical musician story including the drugs and comeback that are naturally key.

Is Cash, as Kris Kristofferson once described, "Abraham Lincoln with a wild side?" Possibly, but with every character like Cash, the most interesting things is always imagining how it was that he came to be who he was in a place like America - people who blindly dimiss the cultural hegemony and damage America does, who do well to explore the fact that both Johnny Cash and Wal-Mart came out of Arkansas in the 1950's and 60's.

Ultimetly this movie is about as conventional, and as Hollywood, as it gets, and that will probably be its undoing at Oscar time. The New Yorker asks if it possible that, "the central lesson of Johnny Cash’s life really be that he was a loser until a good woman shamed him into growing up?" But that question makes it at least worth watching, and certainly more so than any of this Harry Potter nonsense.