If the movie year has been uninspired thus far -- and what honest assessment of mainstream cinema wouldn't come to that conclusion? -- things will undoubtedly be looking up as we move out of the season of movies with only one thing on their mind (profit) and arrive at movies with at least two things knocking around in their heads (awards and profit) but hopefully more. I haven't been much interested in American Hustle up till now (for various reasons) but it dropped a grabby tease of a commercial yesterday so let's play the Yes No Maybe So game and decide how badly we want to see it now that there's something to get a hold of.
...like any part of Amy Adams, just pick one! The trailer and three-pronged breakdown after the jump...
AMERICAN HUSTLE
Though the latest film from David O. Russell moved through a title-fluid state before settling on the sorta generic American Hustle, at least the title feels accurate. This is the story of two con-artists (Christian Bale & Amy Adams) who become entangled with colorful characters from the FBI (Bradley Cooper), Politics (Jeremy Renner) and Other (Jennifer Lawrence's Giant Hair)... though the details of the story are blessedly absent from this trailer which is our first big yes.
YES
• It's the great shame of Hollywood's marketing departments that they have so much trouble selling movies without giving the whole thing away. Who knows what the second trailer will be like (please no second trailer) but this one gives the perfect amount of info: enough to show off its look and actors and sell the tickets and too little for us to think 'why waste money, I've already seen it' as one does when one watches trailers like this or this and to a lesser degree maybe even this. This might mean that Hustle is super confident and does indeed have balls bigger than yours.
• Wait, what?!?!? There's a cast line dance sequence? TICKET… SOLD. (This is one, just one, of the reasons I love Boogie Nights more than most things in life.)
• David O. Russell films are not typically remembered as "eye candy" film but I'm candy crushing on the hair, costumes, and makeup in a big way. Even Bradley Cooper's perm looks fun.
• "I wanna show you something here" is the perfect line to open a trailer... and structurally speaking all trailers would benefit from this approach. Sizzle scene at the beginning followed by GIMME images (I'd try to list a few but just think "every other one" followed by takeaway line *boom* Title. Date. Done.
• This role looks perfect for Jennifer Lawrence -- so perfect i'ma talk about it in a separate post soon. Plus she's the only actor within the cast that I'm not starting from a place of "growing weary of..." so maybe she should immediately jump a thousand spots in the Supporting Actress prediction page despite already being amply overrewarded by AMPAS.
• By the time this trailer was over I had forgotten about Silver Linings Playbook and was thinking "this looks as entertaining as The Fighter and Three Kings" and I wanted to change my Oscar predictions to include it in every category ... now that AMPAS loves David O. Russell it could even be a winner if it's a big enough hit. You gotta be a big hit if you're not "deep" or "messagey" in some way.
• Finally, Jason rightly points out that...
This back and forth alone makes me want to carve a place out inside my hope chest for this movie to live forever and ever.
• Yes, that. Beautiful women + messy glam + actressy throwdown? YES full stop even if we do have to continue on to the Nos and Maybe Sos for the sake of completing what we started...
NO
• Silver Linings Playbook was my least favorite David O. Russell film (apart from his debut Spanking the Monkey) so I worry. Yes I know it won an Oscar and other people loved it but I worry that he has left some of his early truly lively idiosyncracies behind him to become a little more like everyone else. I mean, apart from the possibly electric 'her with him? him with him? them with this?' jabs and shocks and blowouts of his dependably livewire ensembles -- the chief selling point of his fimography if you ask me -- couldn't this trailer be a Scorsese movie?
• I want Christian Bale to stop yo-yo dieting. He'll die an early death if he keeps doing this extreme yo-yo dieting which by my count he's been doing for over a decade now!
MAYBE SO
• Amy Adams is my biggest question mark. She's never looked sexier and if she really lets loose this could be her Oscar moment. But she's hit and miss performance wise, sometimes nailing and deepening her material (The Fighter, Junebug, Enchanted) and other times proving that she's just the luckiest bitch on the planet (The Master, Doubt) with her pick of great roles and weirdly easy access to Oscar ballots.
• Probably by the time you're done reading this someone has claimed biggerballsthanyou.tumblr And even if that doesn't become a ubiquitous meme by the time of the Oscars it's going to be as annoying as "Argo, F*** yourself."
Are you a YES, NO, or MAYBE SO? And do you have bigger balls than Christian Bale?