Crazy Blu-ray delivers stunning video and reference-quality audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
Inspired by the life of Hank Garland, a legendary musician who joined the Grand Ol' Opry at 15 and rose to fame in the early 1950s as Nashville's premiere session guitarist. Garland's immense, innovative talents grace the timeless recordings of such music icons as Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and Patsy Cline. In 1961, he startled the music world by jumping genres from country and pop to jazz with the release of "Jazz Winds From A New Direction," a tour de force that to this day is considered an all-time classic jazz album. Tragically, a near-fatal car crash cut Garland's extraordinary career short.
For more about Crazy and the Crazy Blu-ray release, see the Crazy Blu-ray Review
If you were to do a little pop quiz with just about anybody north of the Mason-Dixon line, asking them to name an entertainer with the surname Garland, chances are a dime would get you a dollar the only response you'd get would be "Judy, Judy, Judy" (ignoring for a moment that her birth name was actually the somewhat less sonorous sounding Frances Gumm). There is perhaps an outside chance that if you were to query a jazz fan in either New York City or Los Angeles, you could potentially get hit with the occasional "Red Garland," but even then, it's probably not even debatable that Judy would win the poll in a landslide. However, if you were to journey south a ways, down to Grand Ole Opry territory, and were to hit up a music fan or even the occasional passerby with a longer than average memory, a third name might enter the mix, one which has sadly fallen by the wayside despite being attached to one of the protean guitar talents of the mid-20th century, Hank Garland. The name itself may not indeed ring many bells with the bulk of modern day listeners and readers, but if you're prone to poke around liner notes of albums from a host of country, rock and even jazz stars from the 1950's through the early 1960's, chances are you've seen Garland's name in the credits. Talents as redoubtable as Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley and many others made Garland the go-to first call session guitarist both in Nashville and, later, virtually anywhere the man's talents took him. In an era when country music was largely seen as the backwater, hick cousin to more sophisticated pop, rock and especially jazz fare, Garland managed to bridge virtually every genre imaginable (with the possible exception of classical), bringing both an incredible technique and an inerrant musicality to his playing, writing and arranging. Crazy is a discursive look at this largely forgotten once legendary figure, and while it's to be commended for resurrecting the memory of one of the most important "guitar slingers" (to use the Opry vernacular) of his era, the film is too haphazard and anecdotal to ever really get fully beneath the surface of its subject.
Waylon Payne as Hank Garland.
Waylon Payne portrays Hank Garland, a perhaps felicitous choice in casting as the actor is the son of two well respected country music artists himself, Waylon Jennings' guitarist (Jennings is Payne's godfather) and country chanteuse Sammi Smith, who made Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make it Through the Night" a Top 10 sensation in the early 1970s. Payne brings boyish good looks, charisma and a certain swagger to his portrayal, but even his charm can't completely overcome the real problem with Crazy, namely the fact that it's attempting to illumine a lesser known real life character while providing little to no insight into what made this character tick. Sure, he's a guitar whiz who takes the Grand Ole Opry by storm at an early age. Fast forward 10 years. Sure, he's a womanizing guitar whiz who's become the toast of the Nashville session musician scene, albeit one who's likely to fly off the handle if things aren't played to his satisfaction. Sure, he falls head over heels in love with his future wife Evelyn (Ali Larter), and is devastated when she cheats on him. Tragedy ensues, and his career is shattered. But where's the throughline? Where's the dramatic momentum. What we get here are a series of episodes, often dotted with famous faces like Cline, Presley, or Orbison, but with little real emotional impact to help pull the viewer into the story.
This sort of anecdotal treatment works fine when the subject is as well known as that other Garland, as was proven in the brilliant Judy Davis telepic, Me and My Shadows. It didn't matter if we just got the highlights (or lowlights, as the case may be), because that Garland persona was so well known, even to non-fans, that context was easy to discern, even if the particulars weren't exactly common knowledge to any individual viewer. Here, in Crazy, we're left to flounder amid characters we see doing things, but never understanding quite why they're doing them. As odd as it may sound, this indie film is therefore much more similar to the glossy MGM biopics of yore, which rarely scratched the surface of their subjects (if even delving that deep), while nonetheless providing solid entertainment almost all of the time.
Crazy is at its best in its musical moments, which is as it should be. There's a palpable sense of adventure and discovery when Garland walks into a Chicago club one night and hears the mellifluous octave voicings of a young Wes Montgomery playing "Angel Eyes." It was a serendipitous encounter which opened Garland's eyes (and ears) to a whole new vocabulary and helped to make his "Jazz Winds From a New Direction" a worldwide sensation in 1961. The recreation of the Nashville studio scene also plays mostly true, with nice depictions of what it must have been like in those low tech days when the whole band, plus singer, just assembled in one room and went for broke.
Less effective is the personal story between Hank and Evelyn, as game as Payne and Larter are to invest their characters with some nuance. Evelyn especially comes off as an unlikable and manipulative shrew, particularly in the latter half of the film. Though the facts are in dispute, Garland's family evidently had input into the film, and Crazy takes the view that Garland's devastating car "accident" was actually planned, perhaps by Evelyn herself, or at least with her foreknowledge. It removes any and all sympathy the audience should feel for one of the two main characters in the film, and is a perhaps fatal flaw for Crazy. (It's interesting to note that two crucial moments implicating Evelyn even further were excised from the final cut, though they remain in the Deleted Scenes included as a bonus on the Blu-ray).
As it stands, Crazy is an enjoyable, if emotionally slight, look at a musical icon whose legacy should be much better known than it is. (The man's influence on other musicians is evidenced by this film's crew, including co-producer Steve Vai—yes, that Steve Vai—who also appears in a cameo as Hank Williams. Joni Mitchell's ex-main squeeze Larry Klein also provided the enjoyable score). For those without the knowledge of American music in general, and country and jazz guitar in particular, Crazy probably won't mean very much, or have very much lasting impact, even as it goes down as easy as some smooth bourbon. In fact, for those people, and perhaps for the bulk of this film's audience, some of the most moving moments are the photos and a brief film clip of the real Garland that play during the film's closing credits.
Crazy benefits from an impressive production design, which very ably recreates the mid-1950s to early 1960s, aided and abetted by a very sharp looking AVC encoded 1080p image in 1.78:1. Colors pop nicely throughout Crazy, with some of the vintage cars looking fanstastic, and Larter's skin tight green dress looking more than fantastic. Flesh tones are accurate, and there's a wealth of detail here, to the point where you can see how lacquered with hairspray Payne's hair is at times. The establishing shots in Hawaii, where Garland worked with Elvis, are sumptuous, with brilliant color and gorgeous saturation. Contrast is also very good and black levels are rich and inky throughout.
Crazy's Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack is a rollicking good time, especially when the music starts playing, which is frequently. Though very few original source cues are utilized here, the recreations sound very close to the originals, and both the surround activity as well as the general fidelity of these recordings is brilliantly clear, with some thumping good low end. The guitar sounds are rich and fluid, without any distortion or "silvery" high end to distract. There's not a wealth of surround activity in the film's talkier moments, but dialogue is delivered front and center cleanly and clearly. The film's music is where Crazy shines, though, and shine it does. This is one of the most enjoyable assemblages of well known, and lesser known, tunes in recent memory, and the Crazy soundtrack plays them for all they're worth.
Typically I find Deleted Scenes to be a big yawn, but the 20:38 SD supplement offered here is notable, if only for two brief instances, alluded to in the main review above. As you watch the feature film, after Evelyn has had Hank committed to a sanitarium, the camera pans around her living room and abruptly stops at her television. As I watched the film, I thought "Hmmm, that was odd--I expected to see (character left out here so as not to post a spoiler)." Well, lo and behold, watch the deleted version of this scene. Another scene which was completely excised points to Evelyn's knowledge of the supposed real cause behind Hank's car accident. For these reasons alone, these deleted scenes are a fascinating glimpse into the machinations behind editing and how to craft a character in the post-production process.
I wish Crazy had dug a little deeper and provided a little more insight into Hank Garland. The man's music is so deserving of a wider audience, and this discursive attempt to shed a little light on his life glosses over too much too quickly to ever really have any lasting emotional impact. That said, Payne and Larter are an enjoyable pair to watch, and the music is fantastic. You may not actually be getting anything close to the real story, but Crazy is easy to take and always entertaining, and receives a recommendation.
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