INTERSTELLAR

     Due to the Theory of Relativity,  IMAX decibel levels and its galactic length, the average viewer of Interstellar will age .75 years faster than the non-viewer.   When you're crossing the universe via wormhole, don't lollygag and don't lock the soundtrack at shuttle launch volume.   I liked the movie, but needed cryonic sleep to recover from stimulation overload.

     Too the good, director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Inception, The Dark Knight) went to great lengths to digest and imagine Einstein's Theory of Relativity at work.  Earth is dying for some unclearly defined reason and we need a new world.  A wormhole has appeared, mysteriously, and a few worlds at the other end look promising.   I had fun trying to follow plot through wormholes, event horizons, tesseracts, artificial intelligence and morse code.  Interstellar is a brunch buffet of scifi and melodrama and as such you usually know ahead of time if it's your virtual cup of tea.  Us fans aren't stunned when the film's scientific logic eventually becomes unglued.  "Let's slingshot ourselves around that black hole."   Fine, I didn't always believe Star Trek either.  

     On the flip side, Christopher Nolan's screenplay stumbles into one wormhole that's no longer excusable.  He can't write believable female characters.  I don't expect (or desire) to see frail women mastering relativity and exploring space. We're not in Edwardian England, this is the future and the effect is jarring. Come on dude, hire a woman co-writer, they're out there.

     The big failing of this film, however, isn't it's lousy female characters or it's humorously mystifying plot gyrations (see the blogosphere for more on that), it's the way Interstellar's soundtrack tries to hijack the movie.  Shot extensively in IMAX, Interstellar features loads of breathtaking visuals, but someone didn't trust these to work without thunderous reinforcement from organs, strings and synthesizers.  It's very often relentless.   And since I'm writing subjectively, the music isn't good, it lacks nuance and any sense of discovery.  Remember 2001: A Space Odyssey?  Whether you liked it or not, the music worked and it felt new.  Here the composer strains for that grandeur and achieves grandiosity.  You may enjoy the film despite the soundtrack.   I did, but yikes it was loud. 

Under The Skin      ** subjective stars

     Beautifully shot on small, high end digital cameras, Under The Skin takes place in Glasgow and rural Scotland.  That's the nominal location because this film takes place in mood, more than in space.  Scarlett Johansson is an alien luring men to their deaths for sustenance, but if you're not into sci-fi don't let that meager, albeit creepy, plot line discourage you. What we're watching is life on Earth from the alien's point of view and Johansson does a nuanced job of making that real. 
        As she travels around in a van picking up men, the alien (and the viewer) are gradually  immersed in the stunning beauty and strangeness of nature and humanity.  My sister said the film was more of a poem than a film, by which she meant more experimental than narrative.   That's partly due to the films slower pacing, more Euro than LA.  Instead of plot turns, Under The Skin delivers story through a steady accretion of image and detail.  Better known for the masterful gangster flick Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer chose to use unknown or non-actors in most of the subsidiary roles and often used hidden cameras to add to the film's documentary feel.  Johansson and her victims appear in the nude,  a handy marketing tool,  but Glazer's focus is on physicality, not titillation.  There's zero porn factor.

   It's a visual poem about an alien's introduction to Earth.  What stayed with me after the film was  the beauty of the images and a feeling of wistfulness towards life on the planet.

The Hundred-Foot Journey    1 subjective star *


What does this film have going for it beside the great Helen Mirren, the equally great though less famous Om Puri, idyllic French country locales, Indian and French cuisine, Bollywood music,  light hearted comedy and romance?  

An Indian patriarch, chased from home and restaurant by unnamed extremists takes to the European road in search of the perfect location for redemption.   Family in tow,  he finally settles in an abandoned villa opposite Helen Mirren's chic French eatery.  Jealousy, cultural misunderstanding, loving omelets and beautiful scenery ensue.

To use a couple of tasteless phrases:  It's a crowd pleaser and heart warmer.

I'd watch it again just for
the faces of Mirren and Puri.

Gone Girl

Although I briefly skimmed Gone Girl in the bookstore while it hovered at number one as best-seller, I forgot about it until the film came out.  Then I avoided reviews because it was billed as a thriller and I didn't want to spoil the icicle-in-hell chance of actual thrills.  For the first third of its considerable run time, Gone Girl does crackle along in a Hitchcockian vein of domestic bliss freezing over.  Ben Affleck's is effective as an ethically challenged husband who may have staged his wife's disappearance.

Then the train jumps the track, the thriller ends and we drop into a weird battle of the sexes that feels spookily Reagan 80's.  Without spoiling the surprises (you'll probably see the film on cable or a plane flight), I'll state the obvious: the plot beggars belief.  Strangest to me in a best-selling contemporary novel is the shameless, ugly stereotyping of the female character.  While the movie head fakes a he-said, she-said symmetry, Ben Affleck's clueless, philandering jerk is no dramatic match for Rosamund Pike's ice queen.

To the good, Gone Girl  describes the living hell your life becomes if you are cursed enough to end up as tabloid fodder.  The news vans descend and the vixen pundits of daytime TV start feeding on your entrails.  The cast is sharp with  especially well tuned performances from Tyler Perry as a celebrity lawyer and Neil Patrick Harris as a well heeled stalker.  

I chuckled as the film bumbled along from on absurd plot twist to the next like some kind of psychotic vaudeville, but Gone Girl isn't canny or creative enough to be really twisted.   And my chuckling was tempered by the realization that this book had been on the NYT best-seller list for months.   I guess you can always put lipstick on a pig, if that pig is a beautiful controlling blond.

The Drop

Currently being hyped as James Gandolfini's last film,  The Drop is moody crime drama from novelist Denis Lehane.  Better known for Oscar winning Mystic River, Lehane's milieu is working class New England.  The mood is always somber, portentous with the threat of violence on the horizon.  I'm not a fan because I find the working class Lehane portrays to be white, humorless, nostalgic for good old Catholicism and predictable.

Annoyingly, Hollywood seems to find Lehane's stories real and they therefore draw big acting talent and budgets.  Gandolfini doesn't stray far from his tough guy chops, but knowing he's gone certainly made me appreciate his burly menace, a certain sadness and his sense of humor.  Tom Hardy does an adequate job, but his character, a mild, seemingly slow-witted sidekick with a very hard interior seemed robotic and ultimately a disposable plot device. 

 No new territory is mined here.   There's a mistreated working class girl in need of a savior.   People rip off gangsters, in this case the Chechen mob, and people get their just, bloody rewards.   The acting and plot keep the ball rolling, the editing and camerawork is fine,  but like Lehane's other explorations of human weakness, eventually I felt like I was eating a bread sandwich.  

Calvary




The new Irish film Calvary turns on the premise that one of a priest's parishioners is threatening to kill him in a week's time in retribution for abuse at the hands of a now deceased priest.  Good versus evil, belief versus doubt, retribution versus forgiveness.  So far, so good.  The clock is ticking.
  
The Ireland in Calvary exists trapped in limbo between modernity and the medieval.  The  Catholic Church remains powerful, despite the horrendous crimes committed by its Irish representatives, but there are also numerous atheists only too glad to spell out the Church's shortcomings.  Brendan Gleeson, the stalwart irish actor, plays a world weary, but caring priest tending to a severely dysfunctional village. What's odd from an American perspective is the lack of mental health awareness.  It's as if Ireland has missed Freud and antidepressants completely.  There is one passing reference to finding 'closure', but a character dismissively states "that's something the Yanks do."   

The sticking point here is that the film does a wonderful job of bringing the villagers and their familiar issues to the fore, but does a lousy one of fleshing out the priest's quandary.  He can run and hide or stay and face the music.  Brendan Gleeson is a great actor, with a tendency to appear languid on the surface all the while roiling beneath. He's fun to watch here, but his predicament never ignites.  He seems almost content doling out doubtful wisdom, ambling to and fro among his flock.  A  neglected daughter is meant to give him motivation, but feels more like emotional window dressing.

 Atheists and non-believers are almost psychotically cynical and despite the accuracy of their  anti-Vatican barbs, the film is rooting for the priest.  If pressed, I would venture that  writer-director John McDonagh has a soft spot for Catholicism regardless of the pointed references to Vatican evil.   The film drifts in and out of various characters' predicaments, but the point of it all is both hazy and leaden.  The soundtrack reminds you that this is a  portentous drama about morality,  and the acting is uniformly good, but there's little narrative tension.  

Brendan Gleeson is great, the film disappointed me.

Get On Up        * 1/2

      It couldn't have been easy trying to squeeze James Brown's life into a feature film.  Born into poverty, domestic violence and abandonment in backwoods Georgia,  Brown used his emotional pain to leverage his way to stardom and a prominent spot in the pantheon of American music.   Watching Brown go through that experience is both exciting and sorrowful because one is continually reminded of the endless, degrading journey blacks have had to make from Jim Crow to the present.  In the back of my mind were images of Ali, Nina Simone, Michael Jackson and a whole list of idols who struggled with 20th century racism.

     Get On Up unfolds in contemporary, non-linear style, jumping to and fro in time and delivering a relatively nuanced vision of James Brown's already dramatic story.   Mercifully, it's taken until now to get this project done;  Hollywood would certainly have bollixed it up a decade ago.  Some of the flashbacks are cliched and Brown's Jewish promoter doesn't evoke much interest as played by Dan Akroyd.

    For the most part,  the film deals glancingly with race, choosing to focus more intently on Soul Brother #1's rise on the charts and his personal demons.  But reading between the lines of Get On Up with a knowledge of say, Ali's refusal to be drafted for Vietnam or Michael Jackson's pursuit of 'whiteness', you can't help but feel the weight of race on James Brown.  Carrying that weight and the film, is Chadwick Boseman, who could easily get a nomination for not only mastering Brown's speaking voice and finesse on stage, but for always making The Godfather of Soul a vulnerable man.  It's one of the best performances of the year.

    From a musical perspective,  the film fails to underline the importance of Brown's contributions to music.  Not a living musician who plays hip-hop, rap, disco, r&b, soul, funk, jazz rock or all the myriad electronic offshoots stands clear of Brown's shadow.  Brown's famous shout "On the one.." refers to  emphasizing the first and third beats of a measure instead of the traditional second and fourth.  Whereas many popular recordings from the sixties forward showcased wall to wall sound, lush strings filling any spaces, Brown's spare arrangements derive power from the silences.  In one of the few musically relevant scenes, Brown lectures his sidemen, alerting them to the fact that whatever they play, they're playing drums.  [For those interested in the development of Brown's musical genius and more about his idiosyncratic personality (he had his hair done three times a day) see "The One", by RJ Smith.]  
   Get On Up keeps Brown's electrifying showmanship front and center, where any James Brown bio should be.  He's ordering purple suits for the band, checking his hair, rehearsing tirelessly and always watching the bottom line.  Ultimately, the film is imperfect, trying to be all things to all people.  It's part Hollywood bio, part realistic drama, part historical drama, part rip snorting entertainment. 

  More than usual Voyage Into Subjective feels especially subjective.  James Brown is a musical idol of mine and his story, in some ways, parallels that of black America struggling to 'make' it against great, continuing odds.  I was moved and saddened at the cost.

 Venus in Fur    ** 1/2

    I'm pro sexuality in art, especially where it undermines perceived identity, so what the H, I had a good shot at enjoying Polanski's romp through domination and submission.  And Venus in Fur was a jolly good time for me.  Polanski's wife, Emanuelle Seigner, plays sharply off Polanski's brooding alter ego, Matheiu Almaric, who Americans will remember as Bond's Eurotrash nemesis in Quantum of Solace.  Since this is a filmed play with one primary location, a theater stage,  the acting has to click.  So does the writing, which is playful, full of amusing double entendre, but backed by enough power shifts in the relationship to give the piece traction.  Venus in Fur whirs along, questioning the balance of power between man and woman, actor and director,  lover and object, writer and critic.  Lighting, a few props and costumes, direction and judicious camera placement make Venus feel like a spacious film.

     Quibble number one,  a fairly minor one, is with the plot.  Without spoiling the ending,  I had a fairly clear idea of what was coming.   The other quibble is more subjective and I'm not sure it's even fair.  More entertainment than involving drama,  Venus in Fur could have possibly been a bit deeper, had more at stake for its characters.   It could even have been a bit more erotically charged - this is fairly tame stuff - although Polanski was directing his wife.   Then again, that might have made it more Taming of the Shrew and less All's Well That Ends Well.  I've ragged on Polanski over the last few decades for his mediocre output (Frantic, The Ghost, Death and the Maiden, The Ninth Gate), but I suspected the maker of Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion and Chinatown had better work in mind.  

Ida *, Dance of Reality, The Rover

     Shot in crisp black and white, Ida has the feel of a good short story lovingly transferred to the screen.  The film deals with the aftershocks of the Holocaust in 1950's Poland when a novice to a convent learns about her heritage.  I heard a fellow filmgoer complaining that it wasn't uplifting, but I found the spare, nuanced style and the shabbiness of communist Poland uplifting because there's little of the audience prompting we have in homegrown movies.  It's a small film, well acted and beautifully shot.

    Alejandro Jodorowsky is famous for a few over-the-top semi-surreal films made since the late 60's.  If you've seen the films, you know why there are few of them and how hard it must have been to find the production cash.  His latest film, Dance of Reality,  is semi-autobiographical in the style of Fellini's Amarcord and there are moments when it achieves that dizzying balance between the mundane and the sublime.   "I don't want to live in a world of dressed up dogs," says a dying anti-fascist with his last breath in the midst of the dictator's doggie costume contest.   While this film apes Fellini's freak show tendencies, it feels dated and objectionable this late in history.  Dance of Reality is chockfull of whores, drag queens and earth mother types that might have had (shock) value back in the day, but now feel as condescending as any other stereotype.  I appreciate his attempts at subverting narrative expectations, but I wish he was better at realizing that goal.  The documentary about Jodorowsky's attempt to make Dune, Jodorowsky's Dune, is far more entertaining.

       Ever since his performances in Memento and LA Confidential,  I've been waiting for another great Guy Pearce film.  He can act and he's got those razor sharp cheekbones.  The Rover is hyped as a dystopian revenge flick that takes place in the bleak outback of Oz.  The film costars Robert Pattison of Twilight fame as a slow witted hick bank robber.  Unfortunately, the whole exercise feels like a reboot of The Road Warrior sucked dry of fun.  It's not a dystopia of excitement, but a dystopia of meaningless angst and violence.  Nicely shot, well acted, humorless and empty.

The Double

      As I watched The Double,  stylistic and visual tidbits from other dystopian films hopscotched somewhere between synapses:   the famous sign outside a suburban house in A Clockwork Orange that reads 'Home',  the ominous televisions in Farenheit 451 and David Lynch's artfully creepy use of closeups.   There's also a screaming crib from Rear Window.   The references pile up and very soon you realize you're cataloguing and not watching.  

      That's unfortunate because the film delivers two very good performances by Jesse Eisenberg in the title role and some beautifully realized,  steampunk-like interiors. The Double is visually rich and full of nightmarish DOS-style computers with blank keyboards, clanging elevators, dingy apartments and gloomy lighting.    The stumbling block is the script, based on a novella by Dostoevsky about doppelgangers,  that marches  blithely off into Kafka land.  Woody Allen, Steven Soderbergh and Orson Welles have trod here before with only Welles turning in a film that might be labelled successful. Richard Ayoade adds zip in the way of fresh  insight or any particular suspense to the material,  The Double clumps along, an earnest, albeit professionally produced, amateur screenplay.

   
   

Jodorowsky's Dune      ** subjective stars

      If you've seen a Jodorowsky film, there's a strong likelihood, for better or worse,  that one of the visuals is tattooed onto your visual cortex.  In my case it was dwarf sex in the Spaniard's psilocybin spaghetti western, El Topo, from 1971.  Jodorowsky movies are provocative visual spectacles and grotesques from which realism has fled.  I'm not a huge fan of his films, but I am an admirer of his chutzpah, his ability stick maniacally to his vision.

      In 1975, Jodorowsky obtained the rights to film Dune, Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic.  He attacked this project in typical style, hiring some of the best artistic talent to design the film's look and attempting to bring on a bizarre cast of stars including Orson Welles, Dali and Gloria Swanson.  He hired Pink Floyd for  the soundtrack.


     In this documentary, Jodorowsky and a few of his compatriots recount the process of designing a phantasmagorical 14 hour version of Dune. One of the films co-creators claims that Jodorowsky mesmerized him onto the production, a claim easily reconciled with the inspired raconteur we meet in this film. He's a bit like 'the most interesting man in the world' from Dos Equis beer commercials.  The crew eventually compiled a massive tome of intricate storyboards and shopped it around the major studios trying to scrape up some sorely needed cash. They'd already spent two million without shooting a frame.   Hollywood wasn't buying, but the grandeur of Jodorowsky's failure make a beautiful testament to the creative power of passion.  If you're into art making, film or otherwise, it's an engrossing ninety minutes.

Le Weekend              ** subjective stars 

     "WILL MAKE YOU FALL IN LOVE ALL OVER AGAIN" raves something called Virgin Media.

       I didn't fall in love again, sadly, but my fear that Le Weekend might be chillingly sentimental also didn't pan out.  I was warmed, and cooled evenly,  by a deftly written piece on a 60's-ish couple reassessing their marriage over a weekend in Paris.  The script is by Hanif Kureishi, who also authored My Beautiful Laundrette.

      Even if Jim Broadbent's name doesn't register, his hang dog look will be familiar from blockbusters - Harry Potter and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe -  and smaller indies like Topsy Turvy (he plays Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan) and The Crying Game.  An amazing film actor, Broadbent seems to act almost solely with his eyes and he's a joy to watch.  His costar, Lindsay Duncan, is less well known in the US (HBO's Rome), but has also been working steadily for decades and is equal to Broadbent's game.  Together they evoke that crazed mix of love and loathing that defines many long lived relationships.   Add to that Jeff Goldblum's amusing rendition of a smarmy, successful American.  It's not heaviosity, not Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage, but it is well written, funny and superbly acted.

The Wolf of Wall Street

       I thought I would give this film a shot on Netflix.  It is Martin Scorcese after all.

     Let me name the ways this movie disappoints.  A film about Wall Street so soon after the great recession might have alluded to the disaster, it might have made some observations about the destructive power of the financial industry, but Scorcese doesn't choose that path.  Ok then, we have a light comedy about Wall Street excess.  It runs three hours.  The main characters are shallow, greedy egotists. The few genuinely funny scenes, such as DiCaprio's drug-addled stockbroker crashing his private helicopter into his back yard, are swallowed whole in a pasty pudding of drugs, hookers and frat boy antics.  Relationships don't happen to these cartoon characters, even if it was based on a true story.

     I like a good story about excess, but there has to be a story, there has to be some character development.  DiCaprio's stockbroker is the same useless schmuck after a three hour recap of his debaucheries. There are moviegoers who are always excited to see a movie star snorting coke off a prostitute's ass, but it's old and it's weak.  And it's deeply offensive, circa 2014, to use hookers gratuitously when your film is about nothing.  If  you're going to perpetuate that stereotype, do it for a reason.


    

NYMPHOMANIAC Vol. 1              * 1/2 Subjective Stars

      Many of the reviews of Nymphomaniac note that the film's sex is clinical, not prurient, as if that somehow makes it more worthy of attention.  I would argue that believable prurient sex is harder to achieve on film than clinical sex.   Distancing sex from emotion is a kind of European art house cliche,  whereby you're allowed to watch gratuitous nudity because the detached sex signifies serious thought.  And the emotionless sex in the Nymphomaniac does begin to wear thin.   Nor is it particularly shocking, unless those scenes have been saved for Vol. 2.   The film is cannily marketed to exploit arty porno, but then delivers the arty clinical.  Despite that, it's refreshing to see a film that's genuinely willing to explore, no just exploit, sexuality.

     Von Trier obviously appreciates actors and they deliver great performances with the exception of the badly miscast, always smirking Christian Slater.  There's also a narrative disconnect in the film between the heroine as an 8-year-old who's curious about her own sexuality, who soon goes on to full blown sex addiction.  Her mother is a "cold bitch" we're told, and she joins a (feminist?) high school girl's club that seeks sex, but forbids love.   Maybe Von Trier is suggesting that nymphomania is a reaction to male domination,  but  I wasn't convinced by the character's leap from curious child to serial fornicator.  He also indulges in several overtly mystical metaphors, extended references to the Fibonnaci Sequence and trout fishing, that are initially funny, but soon lapse into repetitive tropes.

     On the upside is Nymphomaniac's sweetly dark strain of comedy.  In one of the films sharpest scenes,  Uma Thurman, as a spurned wife, slogs her young children into the nymphomaniac's apartment to show them the "whoring bed" Daddy has chosen over her own.  The tone is straight out of 1950's Joan Crawford.  And whether or not you like them,  there are bits of Wes Anderson-style animated doodles and intricate diagrams layered onto the images.  In a film that includes melodrama, very realistic sex, multimedia visuals, intellectual sparring and a deep vein of black comedy, it's hard to fault the director for lack of ambition.  I'm always grateful for the chance to watch interesting film.  In the end I felt entertained and challenged, but also disgruntled by Nymphomaniac's lack of cohesion.  Subverting genre is now it's own full blown genre, but it's not a license to run amok.

     Which may answer the question of why, as the credits roll on Vol. 1,  we are bombarded with highlights from Vol. 2.    You've just sat through a fairly demanding film and you are, in effect,  told to stay tuned for the next installment in which all the mysteries/inconsistencies will find explanation.   I'll watch Vol. 2,  but I'll be  doubly disgruntled if it turns out that the best parts of both movies could have, as I'm beginning to suspect, made one succinct film.  

Non-Stop        (**1/2 Subjective stars)

    While I bobbled along on the tide of image proliferation,  Liam Neeson fandom crept up on me on little cat feet.  Non-Stop, his current air travel thriller, did the trick.  I've seen the pretty good (Kinsey),  the outright crappy (The Grey) and the in-between  (a Star Wars vehicle, Before and After, A-Team, etc.).  He came near to getting a statuette for Schindler's List but came up against Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven.  Like Clint, he's aging into a grizzled eminence that prowls the washed-up-tough-guy roles he's made his metier.

    Never mind Hollywood's constant flogging of shoddy products,  periodically they hit pay dirt. In Non-Stop,   Liam has to pick a murderer out of a motley mix of airline passengers who are being  picked off at a steady clip.  It's Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians at 30,00 feet.   Will it be the Muslim?  The mouthy black dude?  The geeky nerd? Maybe the Julianne Moore character?   Or is Liam a washed up schizophrenic?  No spoilers here, but it's hard to deny the vulnerability of a commercial jet, far over the Atlantic, with wickedness afoot.  And while there are brief interludes rigged for pathos,  I found myself glad to be watching and not flying on that particular flight.  The audience whooped at the end, partly out of sheer nervous flight fatigue and partly cuz Liam rocks it.

PS - For a funny take on Liam Neeson, or Neesons, as they call him, check out Key and Peele's sketch:

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/4494cb/key-and-peele-what-about--non-stop---though-



Next Up:  Nymphomaniac

The Grand Budapest Hotel  (two subjective stars) 

      Intricately conceived from writing to acting, from painstaking set design to camerawork, The Grand Budapest Hotel is total Wes Anderson immersion.  No matter my frustrations with his preciousness,  he's due credit his for commitment to detail.  Motifs and clever details abound.  In one recurring bit, his characters are given to spontaneous readings of windy romantic poetry at humorously inappropriate junctures.  

        
     The camera work is formal and severely two dimensional.  Repeating tracking shots slide parallel to the screen and most of the shots and effects are used to flatten, not deepen, the view.  Straight lines abound and when the camera passes through multiple doors in a long hallway it doesn't convey space, it compresses.   Some of the shots are clear quotes from the silent films of Keaton, Lloyd and Chaplin, when camera movement was technically restricted. Anderson's films also remind me visually of Punch and Judy puppet shows and the shoebox dioramas we made in 4th grade.  

       As in much of his work, the acting here is mannered.  There are bon mots and zingers delivered precisely,  there's no illusion of improv, but rather of an eccentric version of staged screwball comedy.  When Harvey Keitel made his appearance,  I did a double take, expecting method acting to suddenly derail the whole precarious contraption.  

        
      Which brings me to the glue that holds this film together, Ralph Fiennes' luscious performance as M. Gustav, a dowager-screwing dandy with a conscience.  My peeve with Anderson's work is its lack of emotional depth.  I'm a fan of his surreal vision, but his dedication to style at the cost of substance often leaves me cold and bored.  In the character of Gustav, and Fiennes' lovely rendering of him, Anderson brings humanity to a film that is clearly a technical marvel.  I didn't love the film, but I loved much of it and I'm excited to see what comes next.  What more can you ask of an artist?

American Hustle

 American Hustle's charms are numerous, from lavish comb-overs and 70's Cadillacs to striving DA's and con artists.  Everyone's on the make, highborn or low.  The actors seem to be having so much fun, I wanted to throw on some polyester and join them.  That's the good and the bad.  The movie is fun, but ultimately you remember the wigs, not the plot.   David Russell's film makes a halfhearted point about American's striving and hubris, but it doesn't commit.  The mood is too frothy for pathos or satire and you're left just chuckling at the clothes and the shenanigans.

And the acting.  Christian Bale's pudgy Bronx conman in wide lapels and cravat is sumptuous, as is Jennifer Lawrence as his hot, layabout, drama queen wife.  Amy Adams and Bradley Cooper have nice turns, but I particularly like Jeremy Renner's big hearted Mayor of Camden. The comedian Louis CK plays the only seemingly normal character in the film and is cudgeled for his trouble.

One thing that's beginning to irritate me about Russell's films, at least this one and The Fighter, is a  tendency to be voyeuristically looking at lower-middle and middle class characters.  Almost as if the director were winking at us as we laugh at the poor striving schmucks.  It's less of a problem here because the mood is so light, but I found it deeply unpleasant in The Fighter.