The Cinema For 12/18/09: While Avatar Gets The Attention, Crazy Heart May Still Your Heart

Jeff Bridges is spectacular once again in a film

It is another thrilling week of new quality premieres galore, but there is one awful one in the mix.

Though Avatar came out last week, last Saturday was when most reviews for the highly anticipated film from James Cameron. And a strong majority really enjoy that film.

Here is "The Spill" crew with their Avatar review. It is another fun one from these guys, and it will sway you with how quality the film is:


In contrast, a movie that certainly isn't getting any love is the Hugh Grant-Sarah Jessica Parker film "Did You Hear About The Morgans?" Now I like Grant, who I felt in my view was treated real bad for by Liz Hurley after they broke up (calling him "boring" in public is really poor taste). But this movie you could feel was a total disaster.

And it appears just so:

Did You Hear About the Morgans?” is as synthetic as a can of diet soda and about as nourishing.

This is what happens when you throw reliable talent at an awful script.

And that maybe a nice review on it.

But probably the movie that we should all be talking about, just like last week with "A Single Man", is the supposedly brilliant film "Crazy Heart". This, quite frankly, maybe the movie of the year:

If country music speaks for honky-tonk souls everywhere, then Bad Blake — the fictional, falling-down-drunk, formerly famous C&W star played by Jeff Bridges in "Crazy Heart" — could be their patron saint

Writer-director Scott Cooper, working from a book by Thomas Cobb, turns this hard-living redemption tale into a rich, lived-in portrait of a certain type of American fame. Bad Blake is a dying breed of outlaw cowboy — a shot of Waylon with a George Jones chaser — and Bridges lets us see the shadow of every low point that killed every high.

And here is another great review lauding the super quality of that film:

There's a powerful symmetry at work in "Crazy Heart" that's impossible to resist. It's a parallel between protagonist Bad Blake, a country singer whose entire life has led him to a nadir of disintegration, and star Jeff Bridges, whose exceptional film choices have put him at the height of his powers just in time to make Mr. Blake the capstone role of his career.

It's a mark of how fine a performance Bridges gives that it succeeds beautifully even though the besotted, bedeviled country singer has been an overly familiar popular culture staple (Rip Torn in "Payday," Robert Duvall in "Tender Mercies," Hank Williams and Merle Haggard in their own lives) for forever.

Finally, in another person getting great praise for a roll in a premiere this week, Emily Blunt shines in "The Young Victoria". The movie has its flaws most feel, but Blunt's portrayal of the younger version of the queen is quality

At first, Victoria trusts too much; then, after marrying Albert, she trusts too little. She's an English-monarch Goldilocks, trying to figure out how much manipulation is just right. The Young Victoria has a subtler flow than you might expect, and at times it's calmer than you may like. Director Jean-Marc Vallée's images have a creamy stateliness, but this is no gilded 
 princess fantasy — it's the story of a budding ruler who learns to control her surroundings, and Blunt makes that journey at once authentic and relevant. Victoria, a leader who changed the world, becomes any young woman brave enough to seize her moment.

Once again, unless you subject yourself to "Did You Hear About The Morgans", you have a plethora of great choices at the movies this weekend.

Enjoy your time at The Cinema this week.