o'russell's ABSCAM movie AMERICAN HUSTLE

they list it in the credits

ol' catlady camp

Two weekw after watching it I'll still claim this was a better time than Wolf but it suffers from expectations created by filmcrits who know shit about Sturges, are so exhausted by year's end that they'll overrate qny mild Hollywood trash, or need to leave the house.

o shut up

this was so fun

"glenn kenny otm about this, its a sloppy borderline-incompetent mess..."

and Wolf goes over that borderline.

"adams and jlaw are forces of nature cleavage obv"

The great Nature vs. Cleavage debate.

i won't deny that this has its goofy pleasures (cleavage and al) but it's too cartoonish and broadly drawn (and possibility just plain stupid) to avoid being a severe case of diminishing returns. the year-end awards for this will be pretty embarrassing in a few years time, i imagine.

i find the contention that it's sloppy, borderline-incompetent kind of weird. it's not aiming high and probably less aware of that than it ought to be, but for two and a half hours of dialogue with a flimsy plot this succeeded in holding my interest p well

Yeah I didn't have any particular sense of slop or mess -- in the characters' lives, sure, but the narrative structure and edit flow were fine. (Some of my favorite movies are messy, so it's not something that necessarily bothers me. But it's not how this seemed to me.)

I think the middle-brow tag is more fair, but that's what makes it likable. It's a crowd pleaser, but I don't think it panders.

i find the contention that it's sloppy, borderline-incompetent kind of weird. it's not aiming high and probably less aware of that than it ought to be, but for two and a half hours of dialogue with a flimsy plot this succeeded in holding my interest p well

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Saturday, January 4, 2014 10:21 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

sloppy doesnt preclude holding your interest. i was entertained at points too. i'll let GK take the wheel http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2013/12/2013-in-review-qed.html

From the Kenny link (Steven Soderbergh): "But at a certain point, it’s not useful anymore. I stopped reading reviews of my own films after Traffic, and I find it hard to read any critics now because they are just so easily fooled. From a directorial standpoint, you can’t throw one by me. I know if you know what you’re doing, and, ‘Wow, critics’--their reading of filmmaking is very superficial."

I don't think I'd read my reviews either if I were as successful and established as Soderbergh--nothing really to be gained. But that really is a self-serving (and pretty silly, to me) statement as it applies to the best film critics, or the best critics in any field.

wow critics dont appreciate all these cool color filters and affecting descent into drug abuse and prostitution stories i put in my movie so uncool tl;dr

haha traffic is terrible soderbergh faced

Bbazinga

I dunno, kinda big of Soderbergh to admit how "easily fooled" critics were by Traffic

hahaha

Croup otm

soderbergh frames it in a self-serving way ("fooled" and "superficial") but i do think there's a worthwhile distinction to be made between what a successful film looks like to a critic and what it looks like to a filmmaker--and that furthermore that one side can see things that the other can't. AH is textbook movie catnip for a certain kind of middlebrow critic--it practically falls over itself to please a semi-knowing audience from the showy performances to the faux-intellectualizing ("who's the real master?") to the music cues.

I'm sure Soderberg thinks Kafka succeeded in looking like what he watned.

the most interesting parts of this movie were the rather tonally strange manic and OTT parts--like when Cooper is fucking with Louis CK in that celebration scene. there's a few others (usually involving Cooper as well) that I can't remember anymore.

Soderbergh never got over the critical drubbing of 9012Live.

iirc he hates how kafka turned out

the most interesting parts of this movie were the rather tonally strange manic and OTT parts--like when Cooper is fucking with Louis CK in that celebration scene. there's a few others (usually involving Cooper as well) that I can't remember anymore.

― ryan, Saturday, January 4, 2014 1:24 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah agreed. i kinda loved Cooper in this actually

i also appreciated the science oven joke

if DOR really wanted to highlight the chintzy vibes he should've selected something off Victim of Love instead of goddamn "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road."

Can't really think of music being a DOR strength in general, except maybe Lee Greenwood in Three Kings -- but that was an obvious call.

cooper's freakout over lawrence not wanting to fuck him was amazing. i also v much enjoyed the scene with him and ck pulling guns on each other. i can't claim ck was doing anything amazing but i think he was well-deployed.

who is this glenn kenny anyway

s1ocki otm too btw

like i agree that this movie is pandering and lazy but i still won't take the step to incoherent and sloppy

i feel like pandering & lazy are worse things to say about it

i didnt even mean it as shorthand for 'this is bad' its just that while watching it i kept wondering if russell even had any clue what effect he was going for, it felt literally slapped together and a little clueless from a filmmaking perspective

it seems like at the beginning it's doing the thing of Everyone In This Movie Is Horrible but by the end russell's decided he likes most of them. i don't know -- i want to not admit that that's incoherent, i think it's a more specific failure than that

i feel like we're mainly disagreeing about vocabulary tho tbh

soderbergh frames it in a self-serving way ("fooled" and "superficial") but i do think there's a worthwhile distinction to be made between what a successful film looks like to a critic and what it looks like to a filmmaker

I think this is very true, and should be obvious. I know that studying audio engineering and learning how recording sessions really work totally and permanently altered the way I listen, and made it really easy for me to spot a critic who has no idea how records are actually made.

For a likable movie, I thought this was pretty minor. Ever since DOR has made mental health activism one of his issues, I keep noticing stretches of dialog that sound like they come directly out of pop psychoanalysis. Trimming out the music breaks in this would have made this much more tolerable.

In the early 80s, Louis Malle was working on an Abscam movie with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi but it was cancelled after Belushi's death. Now that would have been a movie...

the point of a movie isnt to be technically accomplished, just like the the point of an album isnt to have great mastering or w/e, the intended audiences of both are primarily non technical people, if your wonderfully edited film doesnt result in a overall good movie that can be appreciated by people who dont know anything about editing theres really no point, unless youre specifically making movies for the handful of people who know about editing i guess, so a critic who has no idea how records are actually made is actually the perfect person to review a film

and of course the pro/am type reviewers who have some knowledge of how the sausage is made without any real experience or insight are really the worst of all

if DOR really wanted to highlight the chintzy vibes he should've selected something off Victim of Love instead of goddamn "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road."

― the objections to Drake from non-REAL HIPHOP people (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, January 4, 2014 1:32 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I felt like the music choices were either obvious, clumsy, or both, except for "Jeep's Blues" and ELO's "Long Black Road" which knocked me on my ass because I'd never heard it before and I had no idea ELO could rock like that, so I'm probably overrating that as a choice.

No, I'm definitely overrating it's inclusion: I've completely forgotten which scene that accompanied.

That ELO song is brand new! (It plays during the end credits, and earlier on when they are preparing to see Deniro's "attorney".) The way it looks on IMDB (so salt grains ready), the way one of the other ELO tracks is credited makes it appear they had to use on of Lynne's new rerecords as well.

Also: Alfred OTM. Would have preferred much better crate digging. I kept re-composing the s/t in my head while viewing, which ultimately would be my biggest criticism of the film.

When I looked up the ELO song I found that it's only available as a bonus track on an import of Zoom.

As for the rest of the choices, they mostly served to remind me how utterly masterful Robbie Robertson's work on Casino was.

AH is textbook movie catnip for a certain kind of middlebrow critic--it practically falls over itself to please a semi-knowing audience from the showy performances to the faux-intellectualizing ("who's the real master?") to the music cues.

Maybe. But you could reword that and say the same about Tree of Life.

best thing i can say is that it made me (finally) appreciate Cooper, a dude who's career has p much baffled me up til now.

i liked this, idk its obv not a slick con movie and i think criticising it for sloppiness of plot is missing the point a lil;

morbs otm abt bale doing deniros mannerisms etc for a lot of this but i think he or renner is prob the best performance; coop, adams and lawrence mostly did not impress me but also were perfectly acceptable & had some good moments - adams scream to end the scene in the studio 54 toilet was cool and odd; j law is good comic relief and nicely vibrates her eyeballs in that restaurant scene w/ the miami mob dude

the fed who someone upthread said was doing a walken voice was great & reminded me of jp from grandmas boy

he looked like young pacino and was doing walken voice, it was p weird

he played castor troy's younger bro in face off

can't stand Bale's Method heavings anymore so lauding Adams and Rener and to a lesser extent Coop is fine w/me.

i really loved the camerawork in this, lots of great tracking shots

haha the restless camerawork really annoyed me for some reason, i think the improv nature of the film must've left the camera operators holding their dicks a lot or something, some of the choices seemed so random

Bale's portrayal was so silly that it made the whole movie verge on comedy. Meanwhile, Adams is acting her heart out, seemingly obvious. The other guy is such a dead ringer for Lindsay Buckingham that I kept wondering the whole time when someone will make a Fleetwood Mac movie.

*seemingly oblivious

oh no u didn't

haha it's true: the perm, the permatan, the coked-up seriousness