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.

Three Films Make A Post: A Rian Johnson Whodunit.

RRR (2022): It’s a little wonder the kind of mainstream critics who’d usually spit on an Indian mainstream movies the same way as they do on a Marvel flick seem to have seen the light for S.S. Rajamouli’s latest. It’s probably the cartoonish (yet certainly not un-earned) anti-colonialism, whose treatment of Big, Serious Themes is just as enthusiastically maximalist as everything else in the movie, be it manly friendship or turning historical figures into the mythical equivalent of superheroes. The musical numbers (apart from the flag-waving post-movie sequence that really takes things too far in the nationalist direction for my tastes) are awesome (in all meanings of the word), as are the fights scenes, the melodrama, the CGI (realism can shut it),  and the oversized personalities. If this doesn’t grab you already simply by the virtue of being EVERYTHING at its loudest, but also most charming, then just look at how Rajamouli paces this thing, as if a three hour runtime weren’t a marathon but a damn sprint he – clearly as heroically made as his characters – can keep up for so long without even the slightest of efforts.

Glass Onion (2022): Full disclosure: I don’t actually like Knives Out, despite my huge admiration for everything else Rian Johnson has made. I found it unpleasantly smug in the way certain parts of the “progressive” side of US politics can look from over here (where their reactionary counterparts simply tend to look like fascist assholes), and wasn’t impressed by it never giving a character a second dimension if one was available. This one here, with the same basic politics, does everything right, grounding snarky politics in actual characterisation and much more complex relationships, which does tend to make one’s politics much more convincing. All the while, the film keeps the ease with which Johnson has always juggled plot, humour and a sharp visual eye. The cast is doing fantastic work as well. Hell, even Daniel Craig has toned down his “Southern” accent from rage-inducingly obnoxious to terrible (which is of course the traditional note the detective in a Christie-style traditional murder mystery has to hit).

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022): This tragical comedy about the end of friendship, boredom, depression, places and people that drag everyone in and around them down, as well as the one woman who gets the hell away by Martin McDonagh is the wonder everyone says it is. Funny and sad at the same moment, this shows what are foibles in most of us turn big and toxic in its characters, self-destructive and violent in ways that are grotesque when you think about them but also feel completely natural and logical.

In McDonagh’s usual style, there’s much space left for the actors –particularly of course Kerry Condon, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson – where lesser films aiming where McDonagh does might bury them under mawkish or too knowing dialogue.

Three Films Make A Post: The old flesh is dead, long live the new!

Darklands (1996): What starts out as if it could become a considerably interesting piece of post-industrial folk horror (the sub-sub genre still waiting on its day) becomes less and less so the longer it goes on, the film wasting some promising ideas on occult conspiracy by the numbers plotting. On paper highly interesting elements like the connection between a “back to our Celtic roots” right-wing politician and a revived druid cult are wasted on barely competent suspense scenes; the filmmakers clearly didn’t do any research on actual pagan practices and most certainly couldn’t come up with anything exciting on their own. The conspiracy plot only manages to remind one of films who are much better at this sort of thing. There’s really little there apart from the initial promise, this being the first Welsh horror movie or not.

Project Power (2020): On one hand, I really think superhero cinema could use more of Henry Joost’s and Ariel Schulman’s focus on POC characters, and featuring among others a plot line that’s explicitly about empowering a young, poor, black teenager is a fine thing to have in this sort of thing. But the film’s not terribly good at integrating these aspirations into its more typical superpowered business, the action movie parts never feeling actually informed by the rest of the film. It doesn’t help that the film is one of those films that believe replacing superhero tropes with action movie tropes somehow makes its view of the world more realistic, when in fact, it’s just blowing up its body count.

Generally, the film has a bit of a meandering quality, its plot lines taking too long to come together (and I would argue that excising Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character completely would have cost the film nothing but an actor working below his abilities), and the big dramatic beats never quite having the heft the film seems to think they do.

Visually, the Netflix production is a bit of a middling affair where ugly colour schemes meet competent but often slightly bland action.

Ava (2020): Also perfectly watchable but not exactly great (or even good) is Tate Taylor’s tale of a killer for a weird organization with the least believable procedure finding herself in the crosshairs of her own people while also trying to solve some family business I could care less about. The cast – with Jessica Chastain, John Malkovich, Geena Davis, Common and Colin Farrell among others – is great, but the script loves to go through the most generic plot beats available at any given time, leaving these poor people to pretend the way that organization does business (from its boss doing business at his home next to his playing children to the bizarre assassination plans) makes any kind of sense even for an action movie or allude to not terribly interesting backstories.


All of this would be perfectly forgivable if the action were actually impressive, or the family drama all that riveting, but the former is competent (with action-inexperienced Chastain sometimes struggling to go into the action heroine poses) at best, the latter simply not very interesting.

Three Films Make A Post: Decide For Yourself

The Hunt (2020): Craig Zobel’s satirical horror movie (written by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof) has apparently managed to incense the shouty people on both sides of US politics (the places where nuance goes to die). Which, having seen the movie, I very much suspect is what the film was aiming at, trying to express irritation with the way both sides tend to turn their opposite numbers into sub-human caricatures with a holier-than-thou approach lacking in any kind of self-reflection. Alas, I can only suspect that’s what the film is actually trying to say, for the script is an abominable mess of “ironic” clichés, plot twists that make no frigging sense, and a tendency to be vague where actual satire needs to be precise, and a general goofiness in the set-ups of its action that robs the film of all tension too. Otherwise, it’s certainly professionally made, but that sort of competence really doesn’t help against any of these flaws; it really makes them all the more visible.

Bloodshot (2020): Also missing the mark is this (sort of) superhero movie based on the Valiant character starring Vin Diesel as a revived super soldier who is a bit more upmarket than your Universal Soldiers or your Robocops. The script by Jeff Wadlow and Eric Heisserer has exactly one good idea, but to get there, one has to wade through all the usual action movie clichés, directed at best indifferently, at worst badly by former effects man Dave Wilson (who is yet another example that special effects knowledge isn’t the only thing a director needs, even in effects heavy genres). That twist is pretty clever but happens at least fifteen minutes too late, and is of import for about five minutes, after which the film returns to the same old action movie clichés its twist is supposedly meant to subvert, still directed without punch or verve, featuring a Diesel who seems terribly bored by the whole affair. I don’t blame him.

The Gentlemen (2019): But let’s end this on a more pleasant note (well, perhaps not pleasant, exactly), with Guy Ritchie’s return to the self-conscious gangster action comedy. It’s honestly pretty great, the meta elements never getting in the way of the film, the jokes generally hitting as well as do the action and the old ultra-violence. It’s certainly not nice (and one could certainly raise an eyebrow at the film’s racial politics if one wanted) but it’s so fun I didn’t find myself caring. The acting ensemble with guys and gals like Matthew McConaughey, Michelle Dockery, Jeremy Strong, Colin Farrell and an honest to gosh brilliant Hugh Grant seems to have a lot of fun, too, and better, they do project that fun rather nicely, too.


The only major thing I’m not too keen on here is Charlie Hunnam sticking out like a sore thumb by presenting his usual charisma vacuum, but the rest of the film is much to fun for that ruin it for me.

In short: Miami Vice (2006)

The least subtle undercover cops alive, Crockett (Colin Farrell letting his hair and whatever that stuff growing on his face is do the acting this time around) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx, woefully underused despite being the more interesting character with room for a deeper character arc and being simply less stilted in his role) are roped into an investigation concerning a mysterious big time drug operator after one of their former informants gets killed working on the case. In between shoot-outs, shots of Farrell rubbing his neck and head ponderously, and various explosions, Crockett also falls in Instant Big Lust with Isabella (Gong Li), one of the leading heads of the cartel they are investigating.

Like all the mainstream film critics that heaped praise on this film, I’m a big admirer of most of the oeuvre of Michael Mann, but this movie version of Mann’s old stomping grounds, the 80s cop show Miami Vice, leaves me decidedly cold. For the most part, it is because most of Mann’s standard tricks don’t work for me here. He’s perhaps trying his usual thing of adding veracity to a highly improbable script by providing many layers of absolutely realistic feeling details, but all of these details don’t really add up to any reality here, but just add more mannerisms to an already incredibly mannered and over-stylized film, making things not less but more antiseptic.


It doesn’t help the film at all that its script (by Mann and co-TV-Miami Vice-veteran Anthony Yerkovich) seems to work from a “Miami Vice plot elements” checklist, where every big beat of the show needs to be included in some way, turning the whole affair clumsy and ponderous where leanness would probably have helped. But then, leanness has never been part of the Mann approach. This is also the kind of film that becomes basically paralyzed by all of the clichés and tropes it needs to somehow stuff into its running time, so Crockett gets to hear the “in too deep” speech about twenty minutes into the case, and he and Isabella basically jump each other the moment they lay eyes on each other. Who cares that it doesn’t make sense for the kinds of people they are supposed to be, or that Farrell and Gong have no on-screen chemistry whatsoever despite the film’s permanent visual insistence that this is The Big Thing. And don’t get me started on how stupid everyone in the film needs to be to let things play out like they do here. Again, these are not problems new to Mann’s work, but usually, he’s telling his tales of moody macho men embedded in what feels like a (not necessarily the) real world in which they and their troubles actually belong. Here, it’s just the posing of emotionally stunted assholes typical of bad high budget action cinema in front of slick backgrounds without substance or emotional resonance relating them to actual human feelings. And when it comes to high budget action, there are simply better choices for a viewer.

In Bruges (2008)

When he accidentally kills a child during his first job of murdering a priest, his boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) sends hitman trainee Ray (Colin Farrell) and his older and experienced colleague Ken (Brendan Gleeson) to lay low in Bruges of all places. Bruges, as we will learn, is mostly known for being “the best-preserved medieval city in Belgium”.

Irish boy Ray really rather resents Bruges for not being Dublin, though he is clearly plagued by guilt badly enough that he’d be unhappy there too. He still gets into various adventures with a woman he falls for on first glance (Clémence Poésy), various people he can’t help but punch in the face and so on. Ken for his part rather enjoys a bit of a holiday from his murdering duties. Of course, Harry had a less than enjoyable reason for sending the two to the town.

By now, an encounter with a film described as a black comedy about two professional killers suggests to me another of these innumerable would be Tarantino films that came upon us after Pulp Fiction, usually made by people neither achieving a voice of their own nor a good copy of Tarantino’s. Fortunately, In Bruges’s director Martin McDonagh (whose next film, Seven Psychopaths I pretty much loathed when last I saw it, but let’s ignore that tonight) was already a well-known director of stage plays at the point when he made this film, so there was little chance of this going the road of mere copy.

Consequently, this is very much a film that just happens to use some of the same genre patterns Tarantino likes but approaches them from a very different angle. McDonagh’s film is a (very dark) character-based comedy that is also a complex philosophical mediation on questions of guilt, loyalty, the possibility of redemption, and the ironic cruelty of the universe or god.
While McDonagh treats the philosophical aspects of his film very seriously, and indeed manages to derive quite an emotional punch from them later on, the film has just as much room for the goofy, the weird, and the humanly touching, presenting all of its characters as complex and flawed humans in a brilliant way. McDonagh also succeeds at another difficult thing, creating a plot that is much less straightforward than it seems to be at first look yet which is as completely character-based as is the humour.

So it’s a good thing that his two main actors as well as everyone else involved bring their best to the screen. Gleeson – not surprisingly given he specializes in exactly that sort of thing – provides Ken with a certain hard-won dignity and decency the man clearly never realized he had. Farrell again demonstrates that he can actually be a nuanced and funny actor when he doesn’t have to waste too much energy on pretending he’s not Irish (seriously, unless the actor in question is Australian – to whom putting on accents seem to come natural for some reason - acting while doing a fake accent seems to lower any given actor’s abilities not having to do with said accent by fifty percent).


As a film director, McDonagh only feels like a stage director because he trusts his actors and the characters they play a lot; otherwise he quite obviously works from an understanding that film is a medium with rather different visual needs and possibilities than the stage is, yet never falls into the trap of overdoing camera tricks and visual effects to distraction. Also, for those among us who aren’t like Ray, McDonagh makes Bruges look very attractive, while again showing a discernment that avoids the dreaded tourist postcard effect. Things in this film are generally beautiful to look at, but that’s not their only point.

Three Films Make A Post: They trusted no one. Until they had to trust each other.

The Curse (1987): If you think that Lovecraft’s Colour out of Space, one of the best pieces of weird fiction ever written, really needed the addition of blood-spurting tomatoes, killer chicken, and young Wil Wheaton (among other things to curdle the blood), boy do I have the film for you. A US/Italian co-production (among the producers are Ovidio Assonitis and perhaps Lucio Fulci) directed by David Keith, this thing at first shows promising production values, straightforward but competent direction and mostly decent acting, but it grows increasingly dumb the longer it goes on, some of the actors seemingly losing all professional ability once they are supposed to play crazy, while the script appears to aim for Troll 2 levels of crap surrealism without ever really reaching the heights/depths of Fragasso’s work. Depending on one’s state of sobriety and Lovecraft admiration, this can be a hoot in the rather unpleasant point and laugh at the film way, or the sort of thing that really pisses you of. Me? I laughed at the killer chicken, at least. Even though they probably weren’t supposed to be funny.

Spectral (2016): Despite director Nic Mathieu visually making more than expected out of his warehouse sets, I can’t say this variation on the old chestnut of soldiers versus some sort of monster does much for me. There’s a certain antiseptic blandness surrounding the proceedings, with not even the mandatory lip service paid to the hardships of being a soldier even though quite a few of the characters bite the dust. The characters in general lack even the short cut characterisation usually happening in this sort of thing, leaving them as utterly replaceable monkeys with guns about whose destinies I can’t even give enough of a crap to keep awake during the action scenes. On paper, the glowy yet invisible CGI baddies are a good idea, but in practice, it’s just the same not terribly expressive effect used over and over, while the film goes through all the expected notions without ever hitting a note that’s true or exciting, or even just mildly interesting.

Winter’s Tale (2014): Akiva Goldsman’s film manages about half the time to reach the mythical exaltation its needs to sell the hypocritical bullshit world view of the Mark Helprin novel it adapts. The other half is good old classical Hollywood kitsch. It’s a competently realized kind of kitsch, mind you, with quite a bit of money thrown at it, so the film certainly is effective to the degree one is willing or able to go with it. Personally, I felt a bit nauseated by the vague feelgood ideas stated that have little to do with what actually happens in the plot, the bizarre yapping about a loving universe that again is the exact opposite of what the film actually shows, and the film’s conviction that being held in perpetual stasis is a happy end. Screw that.