Crazy Heart (2009)
Directed by Scott Cooper
When reporter Jean Craddock interviews Bad Blake—an alcoholic, seen-better-days country music legend—they connect, and the hard-living crooner sees a possible saving grace in a life with Jean and her young son.
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What critics compared Crazy Heart to
Cooper has a pleasant twang when he sings, projecting a melancholy, afternoon-y vibe that brings to mind Crazy Heart.
His past-his-prime alcoholic singer is channeling Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart for sure, which isn’t a bad thing.
I get the comparison, but a twenty years younger version of Jeff Bridgescharacter in Crazy Heart (while his career was still booming despite an approaching decline) is probably more apt.
(If you never saw “Crazy Heart,” or how forgot how good it is, catch up.
As in Crazy Heart, a similarly excellent movie starring Jeff Bridges, it starts with quiet menace lurking in the wings and ends in a display of humiliation so sharp you can’t help but cringe from it.
Cooper sings decently enough to be convincing, but his performance overall feels rather like a reboot of Jeff Bridges’ turn as Bad Blake in “Crazy Heart” (or even his Rooster Cogburn, to tell the truth).
Like Soho , it comes from a director who isn’t exactly a Horror Guy: Scott Cooper has credits like Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace , and here funnels hardscrabble men, the women who are concerned for them, crippling addictions, and beards into a creature feature with the Guillermo del Toro seal of approval.
But at a stop in Sante Fe, journalist Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal, "Secretary," "The Dark Knight") comes to Bad's motel room for an interview and sparks something in his "Crazy Heart."
(Bridges won his Best Actor Oscar for a film released that same year, " Crazy Heart .")
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His wrenching portrayal of a grief-stricken gay man in “A Single Man” couldn’t stack up next to Jeff Bridges’ terrific portrayal as a country singer in “Crazy Heart.”
Such was the terrible fate that befell Oscar winner Jeff Bridges ("Crazy Heart"), unremarkable as the duplicitous friend-turned-nemesis Obadiah Stane.