Crazy from the Heat

We saw Crazy Heart over the weekend. It's kind of a confusing film. The folklore surrounding the decadent and depressingly short life of the stereotypical country western troubadour is so thick that I went in to this movie expecting to see awful things happening to people who in no way deserved such a fate, but that's not how Crazy Heart plays out. Instead, it focuses on redemption and tells an uplifting, but still mostly believable story. I really liked how story was told using a cast of characters as sparse as the landscapes of the American Southwest that Jeff Bridges' character traveled trying to scratch out a living. The music obviously wasn't as memorable as Walk the Line, Crazy Heart's most obvious antecedent, but it was still enjoyable.