Crazy heart album
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Steven Rosen's Writings
All photos by Dustin Cohen
Like the character he plays so convincingly in Crazy Heart—Bad Blake, an aging Texas troubadour grown weary of his hard-drinkin’, honky-tonkin’, country-music career—Jeff Bridges has been around music all of his life.
But unlike Blake, he has loved every minute of it so far. And that actually has helped him approach his Crazy Heart character, and the music he sings, with such enthusiasm and empathy. That’s one reason he is a favorite for an Academy Award for Best Actor (he took home both the Golden Globe and Screen Actor’s Guild awards for leading male role) as this story goes to press.
Another reason Bridges’ portrayal is so memorable is because he has great songs to sing. Many were written especially for the film by T Bone Burnett alongside the late Stephen Bruton, rising alt-country star Ryan Bingham and others. Songs like “Somebody Else,” “I Don’t Know” and “Fallin’ & Flyin’” sound like the hit records that the film tells us Bad Blake once had. And “The Weary Kind (Theme From Crazy Heart),” the quiet
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Crazy Heart’s Thomas Cobb: Bad To the Bone
Storytelling is largely about character, and writer Thomas Cobb came up with a doozy when he conceived Bad Blake. The 57-year-old country singer at the center of Cobb’s 1989 novel Crazy Heart works a woeful circuit of bowling alleys and honky-tonks, a beleaguered elder trudging on without the buffers of fortune and respect that marked his early career. The hits are long gone, the frustration is oppressive, and the bourbon is always somewhere close by.
Director/writer Scott Cooper‘s celebrated spin on Crazy Heart puts all of Cobb’s eloquence up on the screen. The depth that Jeff Bridges brings to Bad has been trumpeted by pundits galore; in the last month he has won “best actor” awards at the Golden Globe and Critics Choice shows. His interaction with Maggie Gyllenhaal (as a journalist who offers a ray of salvation) resounds with the kind of nuance that makes the film so emotionally rich. Yep, there’s lots of Oscar talk in the air for this low-budget beauty.
Cobb, a creative wri
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— Bad Blake
Crazy Heart is a 1987 novel by Rhode Island College professor Thomas Cobb that later became a 2009 film written and directed by Scott Cooper and starring Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell, and Robert Duvall.
"Bad" Blake is a once-famous country singer-songwriter who nowadays travels on the road to perform one-night stands wherever he can get them. His protégé, Tommy Sweet (Farrell), is now a bigger star than him, and that gets on his nerves. One day, reporter Jean Craddock (Gyllenhaal) comes along and asks for an interview. Blake complies, and the ensuing relationship with her and her son Buddy sets up the road to get his life back on track.
The film became a sleeper success, in large part due to the pre-Oscars buzz for Bridges' performance, which earned him the Best Actor award. The film also won for Best Original Song ("The Weary Kind"), and Gyllenhaal was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
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