Keeping Score: New ‘Crazy Heart’ Poster & ‘Norman’ Scored By Andrew Bird

– “The harder the life, the sweeter the song.” That’s the tagline for the new “Crazy Heart” poster suggesting a hardscrabble life and a hardwon comeback in the country music film starring Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Colin Farrell. There’s a lot of Oscar buzz for Bridges and Gyllenhaal, but Oscar bloggers are also known to get over excited when they’re bored. We’ll find out soon. T-Bone Burnett has composed the score. The film has been rushed into theaters for a December 16 release.

– Speaking of films featuring music, a new biopic of blues legend Robert Johnson is currently being shopped around. The script was written by Jimmy White, the screenwriter for the Academy Award-winning film, “Ray,” so he obviously knows a thing or two about biopics. Johnson’s life was full of mystery including his birth date, how he died, and how his guitar playing all of a sudden accelerated in talent after he left town which led to the legendary soul-selling at the Crossroads myth. There’s not a lot of competition out there with blues biopics. Many of them are not good, but it at least has to be 10,000x better than “Crossroads” with Ralph Macchio.

-Chicago violinist/alt-musician, sometimes-Wilco collaborator, Andrew Bird is going to score the school dramedy “Norman” starring Adam Goldberg and Richard Jenkins. Directed by Jonathan Segal (“The Last Run”) the film is in post-production and almost complete. Smells like a Sundance 2010 premiere to us.

Here’s a look at Goldberg in the picture (he plays a teacher), but the movie actually stars two younger actors and is about a troubled high-school kid (Dan Byrd) pretending to be dying of cancer, who encounters problems with his new girlfriend (Emily VanCamp) and others when he’s exposed as a fraud.

Bird told TwentyFourBit that soundtracking may not be for him. ““This is the first legitimate full length film that I did,” he said. “I had the monitor of the film in the studio and I’m playing. It’s a lot of work. I don’t know if I ever want to do it again.”

– The European Film Award’s were recently announced and the four nominations for the 2009 European Composer went to Alexandre Desplat for “Coco Before Chanel,” Jacob Groth for “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” Alberto Iglesias for “Broken Embraces” and Johan Söderqvist for “Let the Right One In.” We’re big fans of Iglesias’ work, so we’re glad the imperfect, but still pretty lovely, “Broken Embraces” score is getting some shine.