Three Films Make A Post: Willie and Kris? You better duck!

Songwriter (1984): Given the very self-serious nature of much of the following body of work of Alan Rudolph, it’s easy to forget he was perfectly able to make this kind of loose music-based comedy – with genuinely effective moments of drama – with Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson playing fictionalized version of themselves who are sticking it to the music industry, while also making up for past mistakes and becoming better persons in the process. If you like Willie and Kris – and if you don’t, you might think about your movie watching choices – this is a pretty joyous affair, simply based on watching guys doing (and singing) what they do (and sing) best; and even one that’s not completely uncritical of the way soft machos like these two tend to treat women.

There’s also a pretty damn great outing by Lesley Ann Warren as possibly up and coming country star - who already has the mandatory alcohol problem – Gilda that’ll end in a very, very Nashville kind of way.

Madelines (2022): The final third of Jason Richard Miller’s indie time travel movie with a lot of murder (or is it suicide?), written by lead Brea Grant and Miller is a pretty great example of lo-tech weirdness, reminding me of nothing so much as weird fiction great Jeffrey Ford’s trips into science fiction – which is a rather big compliment. Alas, to get to the brilliant and effective part of the movie, you have to move through a script so full of holes, even I got annoyed by them. Essentially, to get where it wants to go, the film needs its characters to act and react like no human being ever actually would to basically everything that happens to them; it needs to pretend this married garage science couple knows nobody in the whole damn world but their financier; and so on and so forth.

I only made it through the early parts of the movie at all thanks to the typically charming performances by Grant, Perry Shen and Richard Riehle – which is a bit of a shame given how wonderful the final act is.

Perrier’s Bounty (2009): In Ian Fitzgibbon’s very dark Irish crime comedy, a series of unfortunate events (including a bit of self-defence killing) leads to an unlucky guy (Cillian Murphy), his neighbour, friend and crush (Jodie Whittaker), and the guy’s dead beat dad (Jim Broadbent) having to go on the run from a gangster (Brendan Gleeson), his cronies and various other ne'er-do-wells. This being an Irish comedy, there’s much violence, more drinking, a lot of existentialist philosophy (that’s much funnier than the French version of existentialism), and an ironic sense of the tragic. Most of it is very funny indeed, always interesting, and at times even quite moving. And it’s very difficult to find fault in a movie whose main villain finds his demise because he broke the rule of how to handle dogs as a movie character. Hint: you don’t shoot them, unless they are zombie dogs.