Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Back with a Vengence!

Ok, I'm back, but not really with a vengeance. My sincerest apologies for the long delay, but I've been uber busy. Work has been insane, I'm in the process of taking the GRE and applying to grad school, I'm trying to refinance my house, and as if that's not enough, I've had a good bit of personal turmoil to deal with. Aside from all of that, I just haven't been buying records or going to shows in the last couple of months, so I haven't had anything to write about. Not until now anyways. Last Saturday, I made it out to the Tara theater to see the much hyped film Crazy Heart.

As to the quality of the movie itself, I don't want to touch on that too much. I've said it before: this whole thing is about music, not movies. I am a music critic, not a movie critic. Suffice it to say that it was a good film, but it didn't quite live up to the overwhelming amount of hype. Jeff Bridges was great as the washed up legend Bad Blake, but overall, the film just felt like the same story as The Wrestler retold in a different context. Colin Farrell was surprisingly good as a semi-douchey mainstream Country star, and Robert Duvall turned in a solid performance as Blake's bartender compadre. Maggie Gyllenhall's performance wasn't bad, per se, but her character was poorly written and underdeveloped, and I didn't buy her as the love interest.

I'm here to talk about the music in the film, which is pretty damned good. The original songs, the bulk of which were composed primarily by Stephen Bruton and T-Bone Burnett, are believable as classic standards that a grizzled old country vet could have penned decades before, and they're ably performed by Bridges and in a couple instances, Farrell. Where they really did a good job, however, was in the selection of non-original music. The Louvin Brothers, Buck Owens and Lightnin' Hopkins were all represented, and even though I'm not a big proponent of his, a Townes Van Zandt song was included, and it was somehow just right. The best placement of all, however, was the usage of Waylon Jennings' "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way" at a critical juncture of the film. That's one of the great 'middle-finger-to-the-glossy-Nashville-establishment' country songs of all time, and using it at the point where Blake turns it around and starts making his commercial comeback is perfect, being that his character was essentially a fictional amalgam of Waylon, Haggard, and Kristofferson, because they were all 'middle-finger-to-the-glossy-Nashville-establishment' guys. It's just too bad they didn't have Son Volt record their own version of it for the film.

The other thing I want to touch on is the gear talk within the film. I find it rare that this happens, but that's one thing they really seemed to get right. For one, I love that they made Bad Blake a Gretsch player. I myself am a Telecaster guy, but putting a Country Gentleman in Bridges' hands somehow made him more believable and unique, because most of the guys his character was based on are Telecaster guys. That gave him a certain quality that made him way more interesting and realistic than any of the characters in Velvet Goldmine, to name one example. There's also a great scene in which he argues with a sound guy over the quality of the sound mix. There really needs to be a scene like this in every film about music performance, because it happens all the time. The only mistake I think I spotted from a tehcnical standpoint was that Blake tells this sound engineer that he has a Fender Tremolux amp (which the sound guy says he can mic directly into the PA, a very nice, subtle, and believable technical exchange), and I'm pretty sure it was a Bassman, or some other Fender combo amp with a 4x10 cabinet. Yes, I'm a nerd. I'm okay with it, you should be too.

So there you have it. Crazy Heart is a very entertaining, if not great all-around, film with another fine performance by Jeff Bridges. I would recommend it for the music more than anything else, but it's worth going to see in the theaters. Other than that, there are some new records coming out soon that I can't wait to get my hands on, so expect to see me posting with some regularity again. I'm going to see The Bottle Rockets at Smith's Olde Bar on Friday, so expect a write-up about that soon. I can't wait to see what the boys from Festus, MO have in store. Their latest record, Lean Forward, is another solid effort, and I'm looking forward to seeing these guys play live for the first time. Cheers.


P.S. - Here's a fun fact about Crazy Heart sountrack. The first track on it, "Hold on You", was co-written by Bob Neuwirth. That's a name I hadn't heard in quite some time, but he was the ultimate hang-out guy in the 60's and 70's. If you ever saw D.A. Pennebaker's Dylan Rockumentary Don't Look Back, Neuwirth was Dylan's partner-in-crime and co-conspirator throughout the whole thing. He also palled around with Jim Morrison for quite some time, too. He was mentioned many times in something I read about Morrison: probably Danny Sugerman's No One Here Gets Out Alive, but don't quote me on that. I apologize for considering myself as being above making "bromance" jokes, because they probably would have fit like a glove in this paragraph.