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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 1, 2017 4:40:39 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 1, 2017 4:57:25 GMT
From Mark Kermode's review of American Hustle: On Bale: Meanwhile, Bale goes for the same total immersion that defined his performance in Russell's The Fighter, flaunting his bloated belly, fondling his pate, sinking ever deeper into the polyester suits and brown-tinted shades with the conviction of one who is drowning in melted vinyl. He is so 70s it hurts.On the film, in conclusion: Ogling the shiny surfaces while tapping your toes to the pulsing pop beat, you forget that Russell once made such impenetrable navel-gazing twaddle as I Heart Huckabees, and simply revel in the fact that American Hustle is often deliriously good fun. Yet like the eye-popping costumes and note-perfect decor, there's a sneaking sense that it's all for show; an elaborate comb-over covering an absence of "truth". While Silver Linings Playbook was all about the heart, this is ultimately all about the hair. But what hair!
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 9, 2017 21:38:13 GMT
From David O. Russell Goes Balls-Out in American HustleDavid Edelstein, The Vulture, Dec 20, 2013 Russell hustles like he’s never hustled in his life. He out-Scorseses Scorsese: whip pans, whooshes, slo-mo, tacky (but great) seventies chart toppers, actors wound up and let loose. His four leads have worked with him before to spectacular effect: Christian Bale and Amy Adams in The Fighter, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook. They trust him enough to put everything they have into every shot, and in scene after scene they hit the motherlode. The movie is a slot machine that never stops spitting quarters.
Bale pulls his neck into his shoulders, gesticulates broadly, and talks in an unconvincing New Yawk accent — but then Bale is rarely convincing and generally wonderful anyway. Like Russell, he does nothing halfway.
American Hustle doesn’t hold up to sober scrutiny, but I’m inclined to forgive Russell much. He’s at the top of my list of American directors. He doesn’t work neat; he cultivates a state of disequilibrium that liberates actors and captures the messy collision of self-interests at the heart of the American comedy — and tragedy. I can’t wait to see the mess he delivers next.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 9, 2017 22:45:02 GMT
In American Hustle and the Art of the Homage, d. 30 Dec, 2013, Bilge Ebiri explores the topic of homage versus rip-off: People like to quote T.S. Eliot and say, “Good poets borrow, great poets steal.” Actually, the exact quote is a bit different, and more nuanced. Eliot said: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” In other words, when Eliot uses the word steal, he’s not just talking about taking, but also about making something your own, building on what you’ve taken, and creating something new out of it.Ebiri moves on to use many examples from film history and comes to these conclusions about AH: And here’s where American Hustle comes in. Yes, in some ways, the film is very reminiscent of Goodfellas... But thematically, Hustle does something very different. True to Eliot’s dictum, it creates something new out of familiar elements. Let’s take the dual voice-over, for example. In Scorsese’s film, both Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and his wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco) are tour guides of a sort, and they jointly narrate the film. When Karen first butts in on Henry’s voice-over, the film is charged by the hilarity and boldness of her intrusion. It sets us up for some of the things she does later in the film. But it also creates a kind of solidarity between the two: Henry and Karen see different parts of the mob experience, and the fact that they’re both narrating allows Scorsese to give us a more fully formed vision of this world. (We can witness scenes where Henry isn’t present but Karen is, for example.)
Scorsese’s characters are creatures of their environment; Russell’s characters rarely fit into their environment. The ping-ponging narration in the early scenes of Hustle between Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) reveals their vulnerabilities as well as the effect they’re having on each other: “He had this air about him, and he had this confidence that drew me to him,” Sydney tells us, even though we’ve seen that Irv is anything but comfortable in his own skin. “He was who he was. He didn’t care.” Remember, she’s saying this about a man who spends obscene amounts of time perfecting his comb-over. Irv observes something similar about Sydney, even though she tells us that her dream, “more than anything, was to become anything else other than who I was.” Which she does, when she becomes the faux-British aristocrat Lady Edith Greensley. Both Irv and Syd are anxious figures, constantly trying to be someone else; and yet, to each other, at least at first, they seem like masters of their domain.
American Hustle uses its fractured point of view not to describe the world around it, as in Goodfellas, but to show the effect that its characters are having on one another – quite appropriate for a film that’s all about con men. Like all of Russell’s films, this is a story about people (and actors) from very different psychic realities colliding.
... Similarly, while Russell may share Scorsese’s fondness for bravura camera movements and bouncing narrators, he doesn't share Scorsese's moral vision; he has his own. Scorsese tells stories of sin and redemption, of people who debase themselves and come out on the other side. Russell doesn’t feel the need to redeem anybody, because his characters are already ennobled, in his mind: They’re children whose corruption is merely a side-effect of their dreams of a better life. Not unlike their director, they steal to make things their own.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 9, 2017 23:02:09 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 21, 2017 22:15:23 GMT
From the Manohla Dargis, NYTimes review: Only the director here is David O. Russell, who, more than any other contemporary American filmmaker, has reinvigorated screwball comedy, partly by insisting that men and women talk to one another.
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Mr. Bale has long been a great actor, if not an especially likable screen presence — in this, he’s the opposite of Ms. Adams and Ms. Lawrence, who are both talented and appealing — and he’s leaned toward cool, even cold characters, mask or no mask. It’s a pleasure to see him warm up, soften up, not only because he looks as if he were having a good time, but also because he’s extraordinary here. In the past, his performances have occasionally felt like a begrudgingly presented gift to the audience, as he offered us his technique while keeping the more recognizably human part of himself out of reach. Maybe Mr. Russell, who directed Mr. Bale in “The Fighter,” wore him down.
Or perhaps Mr. Bale found pathos in Irving and dignity in this small, striving, vulgar man’s life. Whatever the reasons, Mr. Bale, like some other stars who embrace playing ugly, feels as if he’d been liberated by all the pounds he’s packed on and by his character’s molting looks, an emancipation that’s most evident in his delicately intimate, moving moments with Ms. Adams and Ms. Lawrence.
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“American Hustle” giddily embraces the excesses of its era, from spandex to ’staches, though it’s a farce that speaks as well to this tarnished age. ... But all the shiny surfaces, the glitter ball and the gaudiness, also suggest a world in which everyone is anxious to shake off the post-Vietnam War, post-Watergate funk. The ghost of Richard M. Nixon hovers in the air; everyone is a fake and everyone wears a mask-
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 30, 2017 21:48:37 GMT
More AH related history on the death of John Good, the Architect of the FBI's Abscam project on which the film was loosely based: www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/nyregion/john-good-dead.htmlJohn F. Good, who developed and directed the F.B.I.’s Abscam investigation, resulting in grainy black-and-white videotapes on the evening news that showed elected officials accepting bags and envelopes of cash from what appeared to be an Arab sheikh, died on Sept. 28 at his home in Island Park, N.Y. He was 80.
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In an interview that year with The Washington Post, Mr. Good seemed amused by the renewed attention to the case the film had generated. He pointed out that a number of plot elements — including the romantic triangle among the characters portrayed by Mr. Cooper, Amy Adams and Christian Bale — were pure Hollywood inventions.
But Hollywood’s depiction of the hidden-camera recordings of encounters between politicians and the “sheikh” and his representative was pretty much the way it happened, he said.
Most of the operations took place at a large house in the Georgetown section of Washington, Mr. Good said. “It was wired completely,” he recalled. “I watched all of the payoffs go down, every single one of them.”
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The operation was criticized by some as relying on entrapment; others faulted it for essentially not knowing when to stop. At a Senate hearing on undercover investigations in 1982, the Abscam team was accused of having been made “giddy” by its success.
Turning down the opportunities presented to meet with additional legislators would have been suspicious, Mr. Good said.
“If we were real crooks out there looking to bribe congressmen, and somebody came to us and said, ‘Look, I got a better fish for you,’ how can you say, ‘No, I don’t need him’?” he was quoted as saying in The New York Times.
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The relationship between Mr. Good and Mr. Weinberg “was sort of a marriage made in heaven,” Edward A. McDonald, the former chief of the United States Organized Crime Strike Force in Brooklyn, said in an interview, “because they were both very imaginative and resourceful.”
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Post by RhodoraO on Apr 10, 2017 21:11:55 GMT
Stephanie Zacharek's review at The Village Voice: www.villagevoice.com/film/american-hustle-is-a-con-to-fall-for-6440350The best movies about con artists work a bit of flimflammery themselves. They're not necessarily dishonest; they just can't resist making the truth shinier than it is in real life. There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell's extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what a curtain! ... There's tons of artifice in American Hustle, but it's not the 3D, special-effects kind, and that's the joy of it.
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[O' Russell]'s the sort of director who seldom delights in anything, but American Hustle is his version of a soft-shoe. By taking a break from being self-consciously earnest (Silver Linings Playbook), bare-knuckles gritty (The Fighter), and aggressively experimental (I Heart Huckabees), Russell has shaken something loose. You'd never credit him with a light touch, but American Hustle cruises along like a line of wedding guests doing the Electric Slide. Its plot mechanics are impossible to take seriously and yet deeply pleasurable to parse, right up to the who's-screwing-whom ending.
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Bale may not be the most believable scrapper, but at least he's dropped most of his usual capital-A Actor mannerisms.
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Lawrence keeps it simmering on low. Rosalyn isn't in on Irving's con; she's too much of a live wire to keep his secrets (and she may have one of her own). You can see why she drives him nuts, and you can see why he loved her so much in the first place. She's dazzling, like a dangly earring. She may be shiny, but she's for real.
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Post by RhodoraO on Jan 28, 2021 5:40:19 GMT
Voice Coach Bob Corff in Vanity Fair on the success of various New Yrok accents in movies. www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/07/best-new-york-accents-movies"Christian Bale As flamboyant Bronx-born con man Irving Rosenfeld in American Hustle, Christian Bale is a hoot to watch. The way he talks, however, is another story. Corff says when New Yorkers speak, their lips move forward, as if giving a kiss. But Bale’s mouth is flat. “It’s like he’s driving with the emergency brake on. He’s driving, but the car drags.”
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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 11, 2024 18:29:24 GMT
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