o'russell's ABSCAM movie AMERICAN HUSTLE

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

I was thinkin the same

it made it verge on comedy u say

Verge? It *is* a comedy.

this was excellent on p much every level

bale's deniro, fbi chief's walken, w/e, totally a comedy but adams grounded it when needed. lovely.

pretty much everybody mugged their way through this aside from amy adams which is fine depending on how enjoyable you find it, which in my case was a lot, apart from - surprisingly for me - jlaw. maybe she's better when she plays it straight.

i would have loved to see more of the love triangle movie this was occasionally trying to be instead of the sting thriller it was, even if just to spread out the pace a little. it felt like 5 major plot points fly by in the last 10 minutes after so many nice, luxuriously lingering scenes earlier on. we go from cooper being almost the main character to being a glowering silent loser in the background in a split second.

Agreed on last point, except imo the mistake was putting him so front and centre to begin with

i thought he was great! he's our paul reiser, except crazier. though i did think his virile man-breathing onto amy adams was extremely disturbing throughout

does Coop have curlier fake hair?

yeah TH i thought he was excellent too, but the movie didnt need to lose focus on the main couple imo, it went a touch haywire for a while when it would maybe have been the better for sticking with bale/adams

Don't you know, Russell films hundreds of hours of footage and then edits it into a movie, like Malick. Buzz before this movie was on Ryan Reynolds, but he didn't even make it into the final cut.

rrip

DeNiro was convincing, loved the dark lenses on those glasses

Richard Harrow was distracting

ia that some of the musical choices were a little too otm

like "I feel love" at the disco - that is zemeckis-level obvsness

tarantino does a great job with this; he doesn't necessarily pick obscure songs all the time but he puts them in contexts where their lack of upfront applicability makes it seem fresh regardless

Ha - I watched this and then Behind the Candelabra a couple of days later, and both have disco scenes set to "I Feel Love."

louis ck said the end of the ice fishing story is his brother took a dump on the ice

was dying @ cooper's LCK impression. very giffable.

uh I'm watching Joe Scarborough practically lick Coo's palms on "Morning Joe."

this was pretty boring. couldn't really get engaged with it enough to even begin caring what the theme was. everyone saying that it was tonally sloppy are OTM, i had no idea what the point of a ton of scenes were. like was j law going "i know who you are" to amy adams supposed to be as hilarious as i found it? i would've loved a whole movie at the same crazed pitch as the cooper/adams accent reveal scene and the cooper/louis ck fight but i guess that david o russell is gone forever :(.

this is a classic 30 seconds tho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqDxl5z4V3o&feature=youtu.be

I suspect Coop's cry of anguish would birth several thousand giffs

I didn't for a sec believe Adams would slam a picture frame on his head -- it's a "zany" bit that makes no sense. The editing doesn't hep.

*help

was dying @ cooper's LCK impression

this was where i said 'ok, theyre putting the dvd extras in the film'

i couldn't tell if slamming the frame was out of character or not cuz her character seemed like a total cipher to me anyway. like why did she scream in the toilet stall? her anguish at deceiving b coop? if so then the ending doesn't make any sense.

I dunno, there's a chance she's a little attracted to him. But the frame I thought made perfect sense, considering he was basically gearing up to rape her. Is the frame to the face any more out of character than Bale pulling a gun to get him to let her go?

I rewatched the clip: it's the editing.

themes/tone idk i watched the movie it was good imo

i couldn't tell if slamming the frame was out of character or not cuz her character seemed like a total cipher to me anyway. like why did she scream in the toilet stall? her anguish at deceiving b coop? if so then the ending doesn't make any sense.

― slam dunk, Wednesday, January 8, 2014 4:42 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

nobodys motivation is discernable

oscars, duh