Hustlers and Wolves

A year ago this time I was leading the cheers for David Russell's Silver Linings Playbook.

This year, I want to say clear as day that David Russell's American Hustle is a giant snow job of a good movie, and I cannot believe critics are falling for the hustle,

I cared about the characters in Silver Linings Playbook.  It was old-fashioned at its heart and sweet at its core, and very well acted.

I didn't care about a thing in American Hustle,  Christian Bale plays a two bit hustler whom I don't care about.  He runs a con with an FBI agent played by Bradley Cooper, whom I don't care about.  All the movie does is remind me constantly. of films like The Sting or Catch Me If You Can that do it better.

There is the occasional pleasure.  De Niro is good and has a great moment.  Amy Adams is brilliant but too little seen.  But mostly, I was bored early and often.

If you're looking for a cinematic snow job this winter, The Wolf of Wall Street would be your better bet.

From the coming attraction there were hopes this would be another Goodfellas, an earlier Scorcese film that us one of the best American films of recent decades. And by that standard, Wolf of Wall Street disappoints.  By most other standards It is a darn fine piece of work.

It is the mostly true story of Jordan Belfort, who founded the serious sounding brokerage firm of Stratton Oakmont that specialized in "selling garbage to garbage men," persuading the middle class -- very very persuasively -- to invest in penny stocks, two bit companies with much better chances of becoming half pint runts. This was a very lucrative if not entirely legal business that made Belfort very wealthy, and the Wolf of Wall Street delights in the bacchanalia that resulted, at least until Belfort was imprisoned on a variety of fraud charges.

The movie is long, around three hours long.  When so many movies today are special effects spectaculars full of fast cut action or fast cut just about anything, this is unusually rare.  The last movie I can consciously remember being so leisurely scene by scene was a Romanian art movie that seemed almost a parody of leisurely art movies.  Before that, Jonathan Demme's remake of Manchurian Candidate was a movie where every scene dragged on a beat too long, an extra boring beat too long.  And here, these long scenes can be seen as a celebration of decadence and excess and tawdriness and sexism and so much else we aren't supposed to celebrate.

Yet I found the scenes in Wolf of Wall Street to be tightly edited, taut, and compelling.  For all their length, Scorcese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker were finding the pulse of the scene, letting it play out in its own time and rhythm.  Matthew McConaughey's slightly more veteran broker teaching Leonardo DiCaprio's newbie broker the ropes at a 30 martini lunch.  Jordan Belfort trying to romance the stone of a cold FBI agent on a luxurious yacht. Most memorably a scene at a pay phone in a country club that turns into sardonic slapstick that in term becomes almost Grand Guignol.  Yeah, some of the scenes could have been a little tighter.  A going away speech given at Stratton Oakmont is one. But on balance I was enjoying the slow building skill of the film.

That said, it could still have lost a half hour in its final hour.  We aren't watching this because we care about Jordan Belfort's wife and kids, and the resolution of that plot arc could have been left on the cutting room floor.

I can't criticize the movie for its excess.  It is what is is; these are things that pretty much happened.  I can't fault the film for not showing the victims. It isn't about them, and a movie about selling "garbage to garbage men," you can't fill in just a little where the money for the bacchanalia is coming from?

Scorcese can be up and down,  Goodfellas great, Hugo I walked out of and other of his movies I should have.  But this is a major canon addition for a major figure in American cinema and should be seen. iPad

Quick Cuts

I haven't done a lot of blogging recently.  To make up for it, I'm going to try and do quick capsule reviews of some movies that are in theatres now and/or not in so many theatres but in the buzz for awards season.

Thor: The Dark World
I didn't care for this at all.  The first movie with a very odd superhero movie choice in Kenneth Branagh directing was a little off the superhero movie tracks, as interested in showing Chris Hemsworth in a tight tee-shirt as in endless superhero battles.  Not this movie,  As is so often the case, I tuned out and went to sleep when we got to the last half hour, because I knew it was just going to be another long, dull, over-CGIs, boring, been-there done-that fight scene.  That said, I saw it with a client who enjoyed it quite a bit, as have most of the other people I know who saw it.  Really?

Last Vegas
If you think you might like this, you probably will like it.  It's not good by many objective critical standards, but it has amiability to excess and delivers perfectly on its promise and premise.  I rarely laughed out loud, but I certainly had a smile on my face.

Dallas Buyers Club
This movie, which is getting great reviews, was the second half of a self-made double-feature for me with Last Vegas.  I enjoyed the "worse" movie a lot more, and didn't care so much for this critical darling.  Yes, Matthew McConaughey gives an amazingly great performance in the movie, and in that sense and maybe in that sense alone, the movie is worth seeing.  He acts up a storm, captivates the screen.  But there's no dramatic structure to the movie.  If I can make a comparison that not too many people are making, this is kind of like Catch Me If You can.  It's a lovable bad guy being chased after by the feds.  But in Catch Me If You Can, the stakes heighten as the movie goes along.  Leonardo DiCaprio's character goes from doing small things to doing bigger and bigger and more outlandish things.  There's also all the studio veneer in the casting, with Tom Hanks and Christopher Walken providing star level support, and Hanks in particular investing us in the movie's Javert character.  But here, it's the same scene over and over again.  The movie doesn't heighten as it goes along.  In spite of the madcap energy of the lead performance, the movie itself sags.  So maybe I was dozing during the portion of the movie where Jared Leto is engaged in some amazing sure-to-be-an-Oscar-finalist supporting turn.  Honest!  This guy's in all the awards buzz, and I can't remember a thing about him in this movie.  The Javert character is incredibly dull and uninteresting, but Michael O'Neill made more of an impression on me for his "oh God, not this same FDA guy again" role than the guy who's going to get a Supporting Actor nomination.

Ender's Game
Saw this with two clients and two other people from the office.  Reactions were motley, from entirely satisfied (not more than that) to outright dislike.  I was entirely satisfied.  Nothing new.  It's a bootcamp/biopic movie and you get a lot of the same notes.  Training camp sequences and conflicts you can predict.  But it was well-acted, never sagged.  For some perspective, I read the original 1977 "Ender's Game" novella in 1981's Analog Anthology #2: Reader's Choice at the dawn of my sf-nal experience.  I'm not sure if I ever read the novel-length version of the story, and no I never read any of the sequels.  I don't know if my feelings about the movie would be different if I had more recent or adult memories of the underlying story.  Insofar as the novella goes, I do think the movie does, at the end, get across the knife-twisting truth of Ender's final test, as I remember if from 32 years ago.  And just to say -- I wasn't in favor of the boycott calls for the movie.  That's a double-edged sword, for how many gay advocacy organizations would be super-duper thrilled if we decided to boycott gays?  They could say correctly from our current perspective that the difference here is that Card was on the losing side of the historical trend, but nonetheless I think it's a very dangerous thing to start boycotting or ignoring artists -- and for the past 40 years Card has been an important and significant one -- on account of their political beliefs.