Crazy Heart (2009)

Outlaw country musician Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) is going nowhere. An aging alcoholic, he’s stopped writing songs and is mostly working the nostalgia and bowling alley circuit with his old hits, pick-up bands, whiskey and an air of bitterness. Bad’s former, much younger and sexier, sidekick Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) has hit the big time of country music stardom, but his intermittent attempts at helping out feel more like dominance plays and the kind of hand-outs that do not sit well with the rest of dignity Bad still possesses somewhere.

Bad comes to a crossroads when he meets younger journalist and single mom Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and falls for her – or perhaps the idea of falling for her and the different kind of life she stands for.

Sometimes, it’s okay for a director to step back and let their leads, their script and – particularly in this case – their musical experts do most of the work. There’s an admirable ability to shut off one’s director’s ego for a bit needed to do that properly, and Scott Cooper apparently possesses it, and can use it without making a film that looks and feels bland. Rather, this one’s simply focussed on performance and tone, centring Bridges and to a degree Gyllenhaal (whose story this isn’t it, but who always shows she possesses one outside of Bad’s life).

Bridges is in finest form, presenting a character as a relatable human being who might have become either a caricature or just unpleasant in the wrong hands, without attempting to make Bad better than he actually is. He’s also a really great old man outlaw country singer when provided with the right material.

There is a deep sense of compassion running through the film and its treatment of Bad that doesn’t make excuses, either. Yet Crazy Heart carries with it a not uncomplicated hopefulness that feels grown-up and deserved instead of perfunctory and calculated for its market.

It is also a joy to see a film that treats country music with an actual eye from the inside, with many small telling details about this particular intersection of showbiz and working class art that demonstrate how much the filmmakers get it. The involvement of T-Bone Burnett, Stephen Bruton and Ryan Bingham on the musical side will certainly have provided some of the stuff of reality for the film – in any case, these guys do provide Crazy Heart with a tonally and sonically perfect soundtrack.

Cutter’s Way (1981)

aka Cutter and Bone

The post-Vietnam, post-Watergate USA. We follow a trio of characters who seem too weary and exhausted by the last decade to have anything like hopes or aspirations anymore. A couple of years later, Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) would probably aspire to the horrors of yuppiedom (if ever there ever has been a better sign of desperation, I don’t know about it), but as it stands, he’s working at a Santa Barbara yacht club and making a little money on the side via some low-rent gigolo-ing, in his own, generally passive, way. Bone’s most active desire appears to be his pining for Mo Cutter (Lisa Eichhorn). Mo also happens to be the wife of Bone’s closest friend, Alex Cutter (John Heard). Alex came home from Vietnam damaged in mind and body, having traded in an eye, a leg and an arm for a hankering for self-destruction, some casual cruelty, and a big case of alcoholism.

From time to time, there are flashes of the man Cutter must have been, and it is these pieces of him Mo seems still to cling to, loving a man who most probably doesn’t deserve it anymore, and slowly destroying herself in the process. To make matters more complicated, she reciprocates Bone’s feelings for her, at least in part, which closes the circle of these three like a trap.

Instead of continuing to slowly tumble along towards nothing, an outward force is going to push these characters to their extremes and their doom. Bone witnesses how a killer dumps the body of a young woman in a dumpster; the shadow he sees may or may not belong to local rich man J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott). Given who he is, in the USA in 1981 (or in 2024), this might not even matter.

Once Cutter hears of this, he gets it into his head to take some for of vengeance on Cord as a stand-in for everything he’s bitter about (and perhaps the murdered woman), or blackmail him for money, or both, and he pulls his friends with him, unwilling or not.

Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is what one might call an inconspicuous masterpiece, a film so carefully constructed, one might miss just how great it is exactly for its kind of greatness.

There’s a logic and congruity to the way the plot develops out of the deep flaws of the characters one might miss in its brutal perfection; a precise ugly beauty in Jordan Cronenweth’s photography one might confuse with naturalism; a painful honesty about flawed people in a desperate time – times are always desperate - in Jeffrey Alan FIskin’s script one might not want to face. But the closer you look at Cutter’s Way, the more you see all of these things, how it uses them to embody the quiet desperation of its time and place. It’s no wonder a country would embrace the immoral, anti-human horrors of Reaganism after years of this – at least that way it could pretend to be alive again.

Other elements of the film have grown in importance over the years: the film’s treatment of the unassailability of Power (with a capital letter for sure), of relationships between men and women poisoned by the wounds inflicted in the name of said Power as well as the lies some men have been taught to tell themselves about women (and about themselves), and a sense of anger so strong, acts coming from it will only lead to futile acts of violence bound not to change very much at all.

There’s a deep, painful sense of humanity in here as well, a willingness to show the three protagonists as flawed and broken and often downright shitty (embodied in absolutely perfect performances – especially Eichhorn is a bit of a revelation of complicated nuance) yet still insist on compassion and understanding for them. Well, J.J. Cord never gets that, but then, it is rather the point of Cutter’s Way he’s standing above us mere humans, like the crappy, capitalist godhood we deserve.

Three Films Make A Post: A Western Classic in the tradition of 'Shane' and 'High Noon'.

Bite the Bullet (1975): This Western (not at all in the tradition of Shane and High Noon, whatever the taglines said) by Richard Brooks concerns an early 20th Century horse race across the Southwest of the USA. It’s a film certainly interested in the adventure, and the physical toll these adventures take, but at its core, the film does very much treat its race as a way to explore the nature of the USA, the divisions of class and race, the way crass commercialism can turn into acts of quiet heroism, the vagaries of love on an aging cowboy’s wages, and the way people of a certain age drag their pasts around with them. With Gene Hackman, James Coburn, Candice Bergen, Ben Johnson, Jan-Micheal Vincent and so on, it has a cast that helps Brooks turn something that could be a bit too didactic for its own good into something at once lively and epic.

Rancho Deluxe (1975): Frank Perry’s Rancho Deluxe, made in the same year, seems also very interested in the question of America. But unlike the Brooks film, it also has an anarchic quality to it and quite a few jokes, good, bad, and strange to make, so it never quite seems to come to an argument, and certainly no conclusion, except that sex and nudity are good (and pretty funny), rich people suck (in a very non-sexual manner), and that there’s something to be said for having a very peculiar sense of humour. And everything’s better with Jeff Bridges and Harry Dean Stanton, of course.

Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976): Keeping with the decade, this AIP production directed by Mark L. Lester does its best to transfer the kind of Bonnie and Clyde doomed gangster plot that’s more at home in the depression era US into then contemporary times, with mixed results. From time to time, the film really hits on a moment or two that manages to cast very different times in parallel; at other times, it just seems to go through the sub-genre motions and couldn’t afford the period dress. The performances by our titular characters, Marjoe Gortner (also getting to preach for a moment) and Lynda Carter (who also sings and is nude, providing for more than one kink, it that’s why you’re here), are a mixed bag too, both making at least half of their scenes more interesting through their presence and choice, the other half more awkward.

It’s never a less than interesting film, though – and even this early in his career, Lester knew how to shoot a great low budget action scene or three.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

Somewhere in the US Midwest. A cucumber-cool criminal we’ll call Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood), a nom de plume bestowed on him by the newspapers in lieu of his actual name, has to leave his hideout position as a preacher rather hastily when two former associates (Geoffrey Lewis and George Kennedy) find him and try to murder him. We will later learn it is all on account of a misunderstanding, as well as the George Kennedy character being one of those “shoot first, ask questions never” guys, but right now, Thunderbolt is lucky to stumble into the arms, well, freshly stolen car of a young gentleman who goes by the name of Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges).

Lightfoot, apart from being a bit of a smartass, is also perfectly willing to help a guy out, so he and Thunderbolt go on a bit of a road trip together. Their of course ensuing misadventures lead to a friendship between the two despite their differences in age – Thunderbolt’s a Korea vet, Lightfoot most certainly not – and temperament. Eventually, Thunderbolt manages to convince his – by now their – pursuers that there’s really no reason to murder one another, and everybody teams up to rob the same bank whose first robbery got Thunderbolt his name.

Apart from Quentin Tarantino, I can hardly imagine many directors living today trying to make something comparable to this comedic road movie/serious bank heist film by Michael Cimino. Current scriptwriting dogma (which is, as dogmas tend to be, wrong) would never accept a film giving itself so much time and its characters so much room to breathe before an actual plot sets in, for one, and where’s the hero’s journey in here!?

Of course, the film’s relaxed pacing, its loose yet thematically coherent structure and Cimino’s willingness to let the audience learn what his characters are about by simply letting us watch them in various interactions with one another and the slightly eccentric or crazy characters peopling this America are not exactly en vogue today either. Instead of that one inciting incident that explains everything about a character, this is a film about guys – alas in classic New Hollywood style there’s little room for female characters here – whose characters and personality have accrued over time in a way that makes flashbacks superfluous. You simply wouldn’t get at the cores of these people that way.

Which can also be a bit frustrating to a viewer in the 2020s, of course, when we get no actual background about Lightfoot at all, simply because he’s a bit of an innocent who hasn’t accrued all the damage and lifetime of the other men, and we are watching him in the process of doing so.

Cimino’s great at this phase of the film, too, providing ample space for Eastwood and Bridges to do their things, yet also filling the space around them with things and people of interest, as well as many beautiful location shots (cinematography is by Frank Stanley) for everyone to be dwarfed by. People being dwarfed by landscape seems to be rather important for the film’s, perhaps Cimino’s, worldview also, fitting a sensibility that’s not quite nihilist yet certainly contains the sort of absurdist view of peoples’ place in the world it very well might end up there later (spoiler alert: it does), even though right now, it treats its own view of the world still as a bit of a joke. Particularly the ending, when a very good turn of fate comes with a very unfair price, points rather obviously in that direction.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot isn’t exclusively a loose road movie, though, and once the bank heist plot starts in earnest, it and its director show they can do tight as well as loose, presenting a grubby, often funny but also focussed and actually exciting heist that packs everything what I want from a good heist movie into about half of its running time, until things become very 70s indeed.


All of this combines into a film that stands in many ways in marked contrast to the structure and rules obsessed style of filmmaking en vogue today (which also produces many a great movie, don’t get me wrong), suggesting exactly the kind of maverick outlaw spirit New Hollywood mythology so loves to praise this era of filmmaking for, through a willingness to simply let its hair down.

Three Films Make A Post: The Super-Beast Battle of the Century

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958): If there’s any better way to delight one’s inner child than this classic Ray Harryhausen effects spectacular directed by dependable Nathan Juran, I don’t know it. There’s little not to enjoy about this lovely piece of Hollywood Arabian Nights fluff. Harryhausen’s effects are a joy (and would only get better in the future), while also showing the typical variety of his work; from here on out Harryhausen would seldom use one stop motion monster in more than two sequences when he could create another one, and my imagination thanks him for it. Apart from the effects (which are the star, obviously), this is an excellently paced, cracking 50s fantasy adventure with some choice scenery chewing by Torin Thatcher’s most excellent villain with a decent enough hero in Kerwin Mathews, and photography only a fool wouldn’t want to call colourful. Why, even Kathryn Grant’s Princess Parisa does things in the film, not something you’ll encounter often in this time and genre.

Against All Odds (1984): In theory, Taylor Hackford’s neo noir is a remake of Jacques Tourneur’s brilliant Out of the Past, but you wouldn’t really know watching it. Which is all for the better (the older film does still exist after all), for Hackford certainly is not Tourneur. While there’s nothing wrong with his direction – he’s actually perfectly decent in suspense sequences - he does have a tendency for fluffing things up into TV advertising style prettiness that never does anything as interesting as actually contrasting with the supposedly dark script. But then, the script does tend to make little sense - particular Rachel Ward’s Jessie (who never gets around to being an actual femme fatale) seems to act exclusively in service of going where the film wants her to be instead of where she has any kind of (even messed up) reason to be. There’s a superficial quality to the whole production that suggests a film going through certain surface motions of the noir but completely uninterested in the genre’s philosophy. Jeff Bridges and James Woods are fine, as far as the lack of substance lets them, but then, when aren’t they?


Band Aid (2017): Zoe Lister-Jones’s comedy about a permanently squabbling and arguing couple (Lister-Jones herself and Adam Pally) that decide to turn their fights into songs is a very nice surprise. While there are a handful of moments that seem to come directly out of the quirky indie comedy handbook, much of the film delights by being genuinely sweet, thoughtful and funny, only to in the final act turn to a more serious tone. That switch works out as well as it does because Lister-Jones first took her time to create characters and a world a viewer can care for and believe in, and only after that really aims for more obvious depths without ever betraying what was so enjoyable about the film before. Thanks to this careful approach, the film also manages to go from the specificity of the characters’ lives to the more abstract things the writer/director has to say about being a woman in contemporary US society, the life of couples and the emotional strain following a miscarriage. Which is pretty fantastic for a quirky indie comedy.

Three Films Make A Post: Jack Mason knows he's going to die someday. But today he's not in the mood.

R.I.P.D. (2013): Well, for what feels like a conscious attempt to recreate the old buddy cop action movie formula, but with undead cops working for the guys up top, Robert Schwentke’s film is certainly entertaining enough. It does try a bit too hard to catch the Men in Black magic in a bottle. So as not to be confused with Tommy Lee Jones, Jeff Bridges rolls out a humanly understandable version of his cowboy dialect again (which is inherently funny, though not as funny as in True Grit because that one isn’t a comedy) and Ryan Reynolds is a very pale Will Smith. Unfortunately, the film’s effects look too cartoony and weightless and its design sense is not terribly sharp. But about half of its jokes are funny, Bridges is Bridges, Kevin Bacon makes an acceptably slimy bad guy, and it isn’t generally boring, so for this type of fantasy/horror/cop/action comedy, it’s a perfectly acceptable film.

Trash Fire (2016): This one, about a dysfunctional couple (Adrian Grenier and Angela Trimbur) visiting the guy’s estranged grandma (Fionnula Flanagan) and disfigured sister (AnnaLynne McCord) so he can become less of a total asshole and get over his perfectly horrible childhood and encountering more than they bargained for, is one of those films I wish I liked more. Director/writer Richard Bates Jr. certainly has a sure hand when it comes to pacing, is able to make a film that mostly takes place in a single home always look interesting, and has a sharp ear for blackly humorous dialogue; the acting is top notch by everyone involved; and technically, there’s no flaw on screen (well, I’m sceptical anyone would not see there’s a rattlesnake hidden away in the toilet bowl). However, I never did find myself emotionally involved in these characters, which can come with the territory of a film in which everyone is a complete asshole (or worse). I’m not asking for people with a traumatic past to be easy audience stand-ins or anything that simple, but watching the film, I always found myself at a distance to everyone on screen, which becomes a problem once the film really wants me to care.


Spellcaster (1988): This Empire production directed by Rafal Zielinski is one of the lesser known Charles Band productions, and for once, it’s a well deserved obscurity, for despite a nice enough castle for what it laughingly calls its plot (a bunch of idiots are searching for a million dollar cheque in a castle belonging to Satan as non-performed by Adam Ant for five minutes) to take place in, and some neat John Buechler effects in the final twenty minutes or so, most of the film is boring and bland. Zielinski seems to never have encountered the concept we call atmosphere, the pacing is sluggish, the characters are bland, and for about an hour or so, little to keep one awake goes on on screen. While things pick up a little for the final act, at that point, I was already half lulled to sleep by scenes upon scenes dull people saying dull shit, and mildly confused by the film permanently hinting at doing something sleazy to keep its audience awake but always pulling back before anything can actually happen. That doesn’t just go for nudity but for all other kinds of excitement, too.

Hell or High Water (2016)

Brothers Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster) Howard set out to rob the various branches of an exclusively Texan – and pretty small-time - bank in fine low key attempts where nobody will get hurt and they’ll just take in a bit of money from each bank instead of getting greedy and taking risks. Toby’s the straight one of the two, while Tanner has spent ten years in prison after shooting their abusive father in a “hunting accident”. Tanner hasn’t really gotten onto anything looking like the straight and narrow ever since. However, robbing those banks is Toby’s idea and he’s asked Tanner for help executing it.

The brothers’ mother has recently died, leaving the family farm to Toby’s sons in trust. A trust that would be worth quite a bit of money because there’s a nice fat oil deposit on the farm. Not accidentally, the bank owning the family’s mortgage has decided to foreclose on the farm, and now Toby needs money rather quickly to secure the thing nobody in his family ever knew before for his sons: the absence of poverty. The man has a healthy sense of irony too, for just guess which banks he’s hitting with his brother?

Texas rangers Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and his long-suffering partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham) are on their trail, Marcus using the case to prolong the time before his retirement as much as possible and to grumpily prove he’s still the cleverest bastard around.

Apparently, if you want to produce a really fantastic film set in Texas, hire a Scotsman to direct it. Well, at least if it is Hell or High Water’s director David Mackenzie, and your dream film is a combination of contemporary actor’s cinema, wry humour, and the portrayal of a quiet tragedy. While he’s at it, Mackenzie also adds a lot of consciously underplayed subtext about the plight of the white working (or very often non-working) class in rural areas to the mix.

In a sense, this is a film very much about people the USA as a whole have left to fend for themselves (to then wonder why they’d vote for Trump’s particular brand of lies, empty promises and blaming the Other), without safety nets (because those are apparently un-American). For most of the characters in the film, soul-crushing poverty is a near guarantee, a state lying before not only them but their children, and their children’s children and so on. It’s not quite as horrible a state as that of poor and lower middle-class blacks, obviously, for at least these people don’t need to be afraid to be shot for their skin colour, but eternal poverty does not look that much more attractive to the people suffering it when an early violent death is out of the picture. In any case, it’s not a state of affairs that’s bound to make one terribly law-abiding, specifically not when there’s a chance to give at least some of one’s loved ones an escape.

While all this is a permanent subtext – and sometimes text – of the film, Mackenzie doesn’t make an American kitchen sink drama out of the material. Instead, this is an often wry and humorous film that is interested in its characters as people and not just as didactic examples. Mackenzie gives the fantastic cast room to breathe, or in Bridges’s case to do his by now probably patented but often surprisingly subtle grumpy old man bit. It’s just that these good, bad, eccentric, tragic, pitiful and infuriating people all have the shadow of economics and of class hanging over them, catching them in a net that turns all their best intentions against them, and turning a film that might have been played exclusively as a funny Robin Hood sort of tale into a tragedy even in those moments when it is funny. Or really, into more than one tragedy. There’s an obvious one of lives wasted and lost but also one of personal ethics crushed under market forces one can’t control and barely comprehend.

Three Films Make A Post: More Startling Than Jules Verne!

The House That Would Not Die (1970): Aaron-Spelling-produced TV movie with Barbara Stanwyck as a government executive on leave because of a broken heart moving into an old dark house with her niece. The usual strange occurrences and possessions by ghosts hint at some terrible evil that was done there in the past. It's an exceedingly dependably made film by the exceedingly dependable John Llewellyn Moxey that makes for a decent 70 minutes of old-fashioned spookery, but lacks any spark of ambition or real excitement. The most interesting aspect of the movie is that Stanwyck's love interest is about twenty years younger than her in a clear demonstration that not only elderly male actors were once allowed younger romantic leads. Even though poor Stanwyck's Richard Egan here is neither pretty nor charismatic, I still approve of this exciting demonstration of equality.

 

Tron: Legacy (2010): Remember Tron? Well, Disney didn't, so they made this thing. The only parts of the film (and I use the word "film" loosely, given that this is mostly a check-list-like wandering through iconic elements of the original, but with a darker colour scheme - colours are evil!, as we all know - and more hippie babble than you can shake a stick at) worth mentioning are the fine music by Daft Punk, the performances of Jeff Bridges (now as the Dude in your computer) whenever he's showing his actual face and not the digital uncanny valley version of it and Olivia Wilde. Incidentally, these are also the only aspects of the film that seem to be alive and not constructed by PR people thinking about focus groups with only a vague idea of what the original film was about, and no interest at all in making an actual movie. It's not that Tron was a brilliant intellectual effort, but it was a film with a heart, its very own (and at the same time very timely) aesthetics and a sense of wonder about the world it created where its supposed sequel has nothing but the greedy eyes of a Disney executive.

 

Golgo 13: Queen Bee (1998): Also not very good is this OVA based on the long-running manga by Saito Productions about the super-assassin and all-around tough guy Duke Togo and his inherent awesomeness and sexual prowess. It's directed by Osamu Dezaki, pioneer and veteran of more than one type of anime, as well as one of the three directors responsible for an earlier Golgo anime, but is still lackluster, slightly incoherent and more than just a bit distracted, as if nobody involved were all that interested in making the tits and violence it contains exciting in any way or form.

 

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