Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Wise to the Hustle
Don't kid yourself.
American Hustle: All the other decades can sit down, because the ‘70s just won.
I’m not sure American Hustle is the best picture of the year. I’m not even sure if it’s my favorite picture of the year. But I’m pretty sure it brought me more oh-hell-yes pleasure than anything else I saw in 2013, starting with the opening scene.
We open with grim reality: the swollen gut of a middle-aged man (Irving Rosenfeld, slouchily portrayed by Christian Bale) who has indulged himself beyond his body’s capacity to retain its original shape. Just desserts, perhaps, but the camera doesn’t let us tut-tut our way out of the situation. Instead, it pans up to reveal blind nature’s remorseless ravage: an advanced case of male pattern baldness, made all the more painful by the luxurious swaths of hair that surround it. Life is cruel. What are you going to do about it?
Here’s what you’re going to do about it: you’re going to painstakingly apply a thatch of ersatz hair to your scalp and secure it with spirit gum. Then you’re going to coax those side swaths up and over, shaping, sculpting, and finally sealing your handiwork into place with industrial-grade hairspray. Then you’re going to button your shirt and your vest, put on your jacket and ascot, and head out to work in the world — only to have some overzealous government functionary with more ambition than brains and a better handle on what’s legal than on what’s right come along and louse it up. It’s all there, right in the opening scene. The rest of the movie is simply a delightful expansion on the theme.
If you’re Irving Rosenfeld, your work is conning folks. I mean, just by leaving his room, he’s already doing it: “I am a man with a full head of hair.” In this, he asserts, he is no different from anyone else: we are all working the con, often against ourselves. Rosenfeld thrives because he is smart enough to focus his energies outward. He’s smart in other ways, too — smart enough to realize when he’s found something real amid the fakes: fellow conner Sydney (Amy Adams in the role of a lifetime). The trouble is, he’s already married, and to a girl he just can’t quit (Jennifer Lawrence, half smart and all blonde). Sometimes, being wise to the play isn’t enough to beat it.
Movie
American Hustle ***
A heaping helping of period pleasure from director David O. Russell. Irving Rosenfeld (a gutty Christian Bale, resplendent in combover and ascot) is a '70s Jay Gatsby without the class anxiety, a man comfortable with the notion that everybody is, like him, working the con — getting along by lying about themselves (and often, <em>to</em> themselves). And of course, he's got a Daisy Buchanan in Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams, acting her heart out), his partner in love and hustling. But even a happy Gatsby may run afoul of a bully afflicted with overweening ambition and delusions of superiority — in this case, Bradley Cooper's FBI agent, who ropes the pair into helping him go after bigger game. And then there's the Other Woman (Jennifer Lawrence), the sexy blonde who's only half as dumb as she looks. There's a suitably twisty plot, but the point here is the people. It's a bit overlong and overmuch, but it's still a helluva party.
So, yes, there’s an appropriately twisty plot, based on the FBI’s real-life late-’70s Abscam operation into congressional corruption. But the plot is not the point. The people are the point. Jeremy Renner as the sincerely populist mayor of Camden, New Jersey. Bradley Cooper as a desperately hungry FBI agent who doesn’t know enough to shut up and listen to his boss’s fishing story. And Robert De Niro, scary again after all these years.
Given this wealth of material, it’s not surprising that director David O. Russell gets a bit self-indulgent. The running time could stand a good trimming, and the voiceover stinks of its own sort of ambitious overreach. But the movie’s hustle is good enough that you’re still likely to leave smiling.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Wise to the Hustle
Don't kid yourself.
Wise to the Hustle
Don't kid yourself.
American Hustle: All the other decades can sit down, because the ‘70s just won.
I’m not sure American Hustle is the best picture of the year. I’m not even sure if it’s my favorite picture of the year. But I’m pretty sure it brought me more oh-hell-yes pleasure than anything else I saw in 2013, starting with the opening scene.
We open with grim reality: the swollen gut of a middle-aged man (Irving Rosenfeld, slouchily portrayed by Christian Bale) who has indulged himself beyond his body’s capacity to retain its original shape. Just desserts, perhaps, but the camera doesn’t let us tut-tut our way out of the situation. Instead, it pans up to reveal blind nature’s remorseless ravage: an advanced case of male pattern baldness, made all the more painful by the luxurious swaths of hair that surround it. Life is cruel. What are you going to do about it?
Here’s what you’re going to do about it: you’re going to painstakingly apply a thatch of ersatz hair to your scalp and secure it with spirit gum. Then you’re going to coax those side swaths up and over, shaping, sculpting, and finally sealing your handiwork into place with industrial-grade hairspray. Then you’re going to button your shirt and your vest, put on your jacket and ascot, and head out to work in the world — only to have some overzealous government functionary with more ambition than brains and a better handle on what’s legal than on what’s right come along and louse it up. It’s all there, right in the opening scene. The rest of the movie is simply a delightful expansion on the theme.
If you’re Irving Rosenfeld, your work is conning folks. I mean, just by leaving his room, he’s already doing it: “I am a man with a full head of hair.” In this, he asserts, he is no different from anyone else: we are all working the con, often against ourselves. Rosenfeld thrives because he is smart enough to focus his energies outward. He’s smart in other ways, too — smart enough to realize when he’s found something real amid the fakes: fellow conner Sydney (Amy Adams in the role of a lifetime). The trouble is, he’s already married, and to a girl he just can’t quit (Jennifer Lawrence, half smart and all blonde). Sometimes, being wise to the play isn’t enough to beat it.
Movie
American Hustle ***
A heaping helping of period pleasure from director David O. Russell. Irving Rosenfeld (a gutty Christian Bale, resplendent in combover and ascot) is a '70s Jay Gatsby without the class anxiety, a man comfortable with the notion that everybody is, like him, working the con — getting along by lying about themselves (and often, <em>to</em> themselves). And of course, he's got a Daisy Buchanan in Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams, acting her heart out), his partner in love and hustling. But even a happy Gatsby may run afoul of a bully afflicted with overweening ambition and delusions of superiority — in this case, Bradley Cooper's FBI agent, who ropes the pair into helping him go after bigger game. And then there's the Other Woman (Jennifer Lawrence), the sexy blonde who's only half as dumb as she looks. There's a suitably twisty plot, but the point here is the people. It's a bit overlong and overmuch, but it's still a helluva party.
So, yes, there’s an appropriately twisty plot, based on the FBI’s real-life late-’70s Abscam operation into congressional corruption. But the plot is not the point. The people are the point. Jeremy Renner as the sincerely populist mayor of Camden, New Jersey. Bradley Cooper as a desperately hungry FBI agent who doesn’t know enough to shut up and listen to his boss’s fishing story. And Robert De Niro, scary again after all these years.
Given this wealth of material, it’s not surprising that director David O. Russell gets a bit self-indulgent. The running time could stand a good trimming, and the voiceover stinks of its own sort of ambitious overreach. But the movie’s hustle is good enough that you’re still likely to leave smiling.
Comments