DVD Review: American Hustle (2013)

Fire Up Some Popcorn in Your Science Oven:
American Hustle is Now Available to Own  

More than any other time of the year, award season brings out the critic in all of us as films are held side by side for comparison and ranked in an endless number of ways on an ever-growing number of lists.

And since film press is nothing if not pattern driven as PR firms pitch the same press releases and angles to everyone on their contact list, by the end of each annual award season, audiences inundated by the constant stream of similarly covered news and editorial pieces often feel like opinions announced again and again have become the official word on the matter.

Whether consciously or not, the steady stream of repetition can trick you into thinking you’ve seen something you might not have seen or felt something you might not have felt just because of majority rule and the amount of ink spilled on whatever the topic may be. Of course, in the end, the only opinion that truly matters to you is your own in assessing everything and making up your own mind.

Yet given how successfully opinion is turned into fact in today’s fast-paced world, I couldn’t help but feel that the conman, chameleon-like quick-thinking characters that populate American Hustle would – if set in contemporary Hollywood rather than ‘70s New York – have been absolutely brilliant working in the film industry when it comes to spinning yarns and selling anything they want to earn a buck.

And perhaps part of the reason that Silver Linings Playbook and Three Kings filmmaker David O. Russell was so drawn to the world of Hustle was because it felt so familiar. Of course, that’s in addition to the way the film provides him with a springboard for the themes and motifs that have obsessed him for ages given its tale of multiple love triangles that lie just below the surface of the characters’ existential search for the happiness epitomized by the promise of the American Dream.

Revisiting the same throughline that has dominated his oeuvre from Flirting With Disaster all the way up through Silver Linings that focuses on an internal quest undertaken by a character who hits a metaphorical wall and then needs to figure out how to turn their life around for the better, Russell has achieved the impossible. He’s managed to make the seemingly larger-than-life characters of American Hustle not only endlessly fascinating but surprisingly relatable (if only on the most primal of levels) from start to finish.

Like all other film fans who read far too much award season coverage, I couldn’t believe how much this film was compared to Martin Scorsese’s ode to Wall Street driven hedonistic excess – The Wolf of Wall Street.

While some people focused on both films’ emphasis on con men and colorful characters (not to mention the fact that both pictures were based on true stories – albeit quite loosely in the case of Hustle), others emphasized the Goodfellas meets Boogie Nights ode to glitz and glamour of Russell’s cinematic technique.

Going against popular consensus – despite growing up with a particular fondness for Scorsese whose works I knew inside and out – while I understood the surface level comparisons, the one thing I was totally unprepared for is just how much I preferred Hustle to the overblown exhaustive spectacle that was Wolf.

Additionally it was absolutely thrilling to discover that unlike the interchangeable blow-up doll like women that were used as sex toys for gratuitous scenes of unappealingly animalistic sexcapades in Wolf, Russell has – in once again reteaming not only with his Oscar winning Silver actress Jennifer Lawrence but nominated Fighter star Amy Adams – crafted two fully realized female characters.

Using Adams and Lawrence as muses the way that Scorsese uses DiCaprio, writer/director Russell ensured that the women of Hustle were just as (if not more) powerful, intelligent and fascinating than the male characters who became their marks in love and life via Bradley Cooper’s ambitious yet easily manipulated FBI agent to Christian Bale’s confident conman and the bighearted politician played by Jeremy Renner.

Completely vanishing into their Oscar nominated roles and changing multiple times from start to finish, American Hustle is a master class in acting.

Rewriting Eric Warren Singer’s more procedural, fact based script that centered on the outrageous headline grabbing Abscam scandal to flesh out the characters and infuse the thriller elements with off-the-cuff, fast-moving humor and complicated, multifaceted romance, Russell used his writer’s sensibility to helm what is his most exciting film to date.

The recipient of three Golden Globes including Best Picture (Musical or Comedy), while it would lose all ten of its Oscar nominated categories matching the same fate as Wolf's, it’s my prediction that just like 1997’s overlooked Boogie Nights, Hustle’s reputation will grow stronger than Silver and Fighter’s in the years ahead.

Featuring some of the most quotable dialogue of the year, American Hustle also boasts a virtuoso performance by Amy Adams who plays a woman with so many layers and complex mysteries that in retrospect, I truly believe she had the most difficult role and should’ve been awarded the Oscar for Best Actress over dazzling Blue Jasmine star Cate Blanchett.

Newly transferred to disc to hopefully kickstart a greater appreciation for this American masterpiece, Sony’s high-caliber DVD release comes complete with an Ultraviolet digital copy and featurettes plus additional footage you’re sure to relish on repeat viewings to explore the dizzying highs and lows that coexist in a single scene by characters that grow more intriguing with each passing minute.

Through American Hustle, Russell proves that when it comes to quality filmmaking, you can’t hustle viewers ready to process everything they’ve read during award season on their own terms while watching a movie filled with people that do the same.   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Three Kings (1999)

Now Available to Own

“Are we shooting people or what?” The sheer confusion and utter insanity of war embodied in the sardonic query posed by first class Army Reserve Sergeant Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), which opens David O. Russell's screwball soldier boy heist movie immediately sets the tone of what's to come.

It's a pitch-perfect first line of dialogue in a year of enviably brilliant screenplays from American Beauty to Magnolia to Being John Malkovich and in 1999's prolific year where creative, thought-provoking masterpieces were pouring into the multiplex like rain in Seattle, the fact that we can instantly recall those words eleven years later speaks volumes.

Nonetheless, at the same time, we were overwhelmed and damn near spoiled by theatrical greatness the likes we haven't seen very often in recent years of titles that we usually randomly wind up adding to our Top 10 list largely by lack of suitable options. Thus, it's unfortunate that aside from critical praise including earning a major champion in Roger Ebert, Three Kings didn't receive the attention it deserved in a crowded twelve months of unforgettable pictures.

While overall the year belonged to Sam Mendes and Alan Ball's equally sardonic, satirical Beauty, ironically Kings was eclipsed in the arty scene by the efforts of one of the film's stars – Spike Jonze's own instant cult favorite Being John Malkovich.

And after American soldiers returned to Iraq following the horrific attacks of 9/11, Warner Brothers' acclaimed Kings began drawing a new wave of interest from fans. Particularly, it attracted those looking to address parallels in the both wars in tandem with the fact that both conflicts were overseen by presidents from the same family as well as the increasing concern that like the Gulf War, we were predominantly fighting for oil as addressed in Kings.

Yet because of sensitivity and controversy surrounding the situation, it seemed that the thing we needed more than anything in order to step back and really look closer (to use a lesson from Mendes' Beauty) with regard to Russell's Kings was time, making this recent Blu-ray release one of extraordinary pre-election urgency.

Honestly, this is particularly vital in assessing not just the confusion, overwhelming complexities and acknowledgment that nothing is black and white but to a larger extent in understanding just how eerie it is in retrospect to dissect the way that history just keeps repeating itself whether or not “we're shooting people or what.”

And although it's not bashful about its politics, Russell's movie works well on a number of levels, best perhaps as first and foremost an old-fashioned '60s testosterone fueled male camaraderie outsider picture of men on a mission.

But instead of presenting us with a Kelly's Heroes ensemble consisting of a Dirty Dozen or Magnificent Seven large number, we tag along with a small group of soldiers played by George Clooney's embittered nearly retired Major, Wahlberg's Troy and his friend Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) along with Troy's sycophantic sidekick Conrad (Jonze).

The core trio comprise the eponymous three kings, in an admittedly less than religious but extremely witty interpretation of the tale in reverse as unlike their namesake's role of bearing gifts after traveling afar, their intent is to take ill-gotten goods back for themselves in the form of Saddam Hussein's stolen Kuwaiti gold.

In addition to the Kubrickian Strangelove infused larger than life situations where messages masquerade as humor, Russell manages to satirize the media, most specifically via actress Nora Dunn's thinly disguised take on Christiane Amanpour, whose career at CNN you may recall was solidified for her Gulf War coverage.

To push this agenda of the filter of news coverage even further on a stylistic, subtle level, the look of the film is incredibly surreal as Kings' team bleached the film stock, thereby desaturating color in order to bring the war home to viewers the way that we first saw it in newsprint to trippy effect.

Piecing together different elements in a genre blending quilt of madness and freewheeling creativity, what begins as an adventurous buddy comedy morphs into something much more humanistic and troubling. Since they are after all supposed to be heroic, predictably the men's pursuit of stolen fortune is usurped by the reality of the “New Iraq” following the conclusion of the war as the American soldiers aren't able to take up arms against Saddam's loyal fighters who kill innocents in cold blood before their eyes.

Ultimately, they face a tough moral decision of whether or not to get involved without the government say-so because as both human beings and soldiers they just can't witness such atrocities without response. However, around this point, Kings begins to grow slightly incredulous as it moves from a smaller scale war film into something resembling a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western in the vein of the Kurosawa remake A Fistful of Dollars in yet another example of Russell's growing tapestry of genre interplay.

Nonetheless, ultimately its temporary loss of focus and direction in the last act is forgiven by the overall visceral impact of the work when the credits roll. Impossible to pin down, Kings is a towering achievement and the type of film that the abysmal, pointless Clooney vehicle The Men Who Stare at Goats proved cannot be duplicated.

However, given Russell's fascination with visualizing the damage a bullet causes on the inside of the body rather than through fake blood on the outside, Kings is not a film for the squeamish or to be watched while dining. But just like the insanity of wondering whether or not to fire a gun from the start, these explosive sequences are vital to illuminate what really goes on after the squeeze of a trigger.

Although his disagreement and fights with the director were widely publicized and debated in the media, Kings boasts a tremendous breakout performance by Clooney whose turn in the film solidified his potential as a leading man on the big screen as opposed to just his small screen work on TV's E.R..

And fortunately, the movie shines in an exceptional Blu-ray transfer wherein the explosive high definition sound rockets through all of your home theatre speakers and likewise ensures that you won't miss Russell's incredibly penned memorable lines. For the time has never been better to take another trip through Russell's royally twisted Kings to appreciate the genius hidden like Saddam's gold under the facade of a war-torn buddy heist action dramady.


Text ©2010, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  

FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Flirting With Disaster

Director: David O. Russell

Nobody does discomfort better than Ben Stiller—whether he’s teaching Robert De Niro the secret of “Puff The Magic Dragon” in Meet The Parents or getting even with deadbeat dad Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums, Ben Stiller is the master at conveying the inner squirm in all of us when faced with situations in which we do not wish to be. In Flirting With Disaster, David O. Russell’s hilarious contemporary mesh of classic screwball comedic dialogue, eccentric characters and anything goes attitude with freewheelin’ 1970’s American road films, Stiller portrays scientist Mel Coplin, an adult so neurotic that he’s unable to choose a name for his four month old son, much to the annoyance of his patient wife Patricia Arquette (playing mousy rather than sexy for a change). Believing that tracking down his original parents who had given him up for adoption many years earlier will give Mel a better sense of self, Mel enlists the help of seductive, former dancer turned adoption counselor Tea Leoni and informs his adoptive parents (George Segal and Mary Tyler Moore) that he’s on a mission to California. The journey leads Mel, his wife and the counselor on a series of dead ends, including misunderstandings, odd encounters with increasingly bizarre (yet hilariously memorable) personalities and misinformation that gets more twisted as the film continues in a way that seems like a throwback to not only Bringing Up Baby but the entire career of Preston Sturges (with a much more contemporary, adult 90’s screenplay that speaks bluntly about some pretty blush-worthy topics). The film is even funnier on repeat viewings with an impressive number of layers upon layers of jokes that often sink in minutes (or even days) after the first viewing and Flirting With Disaster is a great movie to watch with friends to share in not only the laughter, of course, but also Stiller’s classic discomfort.