The soundtrack is amazing, I thought some of the performances were just pitch perfect for the era David O. The importance of the look also is that while the guy is a conman he isn't a slick type one might expect, but a guy with a ridiculous comb-over that wouldn't con anyone to think that he has a full head of hair, so there was no reason to radically change the person's looks for the movie since it works better as it is. Not that it's a biopic, and the character is only loosely based on the real life conman and informant, and they changed the name, but still, it is based on him (and Bale met him too for any questions plus accent stuff). Nothing to do with some other movie, but the actual person. It's obviously not "derivative of Tropic Thunder" because Bale's character is based on a real person - that's where the comb-over, weight, glasses, etc. Well, I don't see the look as some kind of a joke (the character is about the character - not about the actor), so we see it differently to begin with. u/kingofthejungle223 ?Īnyway, what you said is needlessly harsh. I know there's a lot of fans of I <3 Huckabees on this subreddit, too. No one should be allowed to continue directing after making a movie like that. They're bullshit artists, plain and simple, which we all are to a certain degree. Russell doesn't wish to really make us empathize with them doesn't make them any less interesting to watch.įorget the fact that they're criminals. Comedies tend to have outlandish characters, but they are based on real people AND their humanity occasionally comes out. American Hustle takes all of our nasty traits-our selfishness, our clumsiness, our infidelities, etc.-and projects them in hi-def so we can see them and we can laugh about the fact that a satire is doing what it's supposed to be doing: using comedy as a reflection of ourselves. He's showing these ridiculous people as they are: bufoonish, but charming at the same time. What you're doing is akin to somebody suggesting Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise fails because it doesn't succeed as a crime picture or lets us have any insights into con-artists. Russell could give two shits about what Scorsese perceptively showed about gangsters in his pictures! It's a modern screwball and a modern satire that merely uses the crime genre as a framework for larger things. You still have the misperception that American Hustle is trying to be a crime movie. Too much pinstriping and retro-styling on a badly-built reissue.Ĭharacter is essential to the crime genre. That sounds elitist, I know- but it seems to be a commonly held opinion among people who actively dislike the movie. Which wouldn't be a bad thing, if it was intentionally that way and was good at being as such. He obscures their substance further with the stylization in the movie. Russell distances us from the characters by completely covering them with layers of attention-stealing costumes, makeup, and hair product. There's too much emphasis in the wrong places, resulting in what feels like Scorsese by someone who didn't really WATCH Scorsese. The movie and a lot of its elements in my opinion render themselves inert in the way that same way the costume design and makeup do. I think that quality is what OP is describing.I refer to the movie as the Oscar winner for Best Wigs in a Period Piece. I got the joke- the makeup and hair were just so bad that it killed the punchline. Ultimately, I felt like I was watching a satire, not an actually sincere movie. I couldn't for the life of me find one redeeming quality about any of the characters. There is a common thread in all of these mob-centric movies that, although the main characters are genuinely bad people who commit horrible acts, they have redeeming qualities about them that makes the audience, for whatever reason, empathize with them. Or maybe I'm just trying to reconcile with how much I really didn't enjoy the film.Īnother difference I found between this movie and its closest peers (Goodfellas, Casino, etc.) is that I really didn't find myself drawn to any one of the characters. Maybe the casts' (in my opinion) less than stellar performances were just that because they were portraying these seedy, deceitful personalities on the screen? Maybe that was the point of the movie though? That they are all, fundamentally, liars. A sharp, at times witty, crime movie about incredibly nefarious but equally likable people doing incredibly nefarious things. To me, it was trying too hard to be a Goodfellas, Casino, or Wolf of Wall Street. Almost like it was trying too hard.įrom the glaringly bad makeup on Christian Bale, to the intensely underwhelming performances all around, I just failed to see why it was such a sensation critically and in the box office. I watched American Hustle for the first time the other day after finally succumbing to all of the hype surround it and it just felt.
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