11/9/2023 0 Comments Bradley cooper and amy adams movie![]() “Some of this actually happened,” reads a title at the beginning of the film, and that’s inarguably correct. Although the script, co-written by Russell and Eric Singer, draws extensively on the Abscam bribery scandal of the late ‘70s, a particularly crazy news blip from an era of generalized insanity, I’m delighted that they never try to claim it’s all true. ![]() “American Hustle” feels like the fulfillment of this comeback, a work of tremendous confidence and dazzling showmanship that may just be a delirious movie-as-drug-high or may, if you choose to read it this way, contain a level of commentary about the nature of America and the illusioneering of Hollywood. I’m not trying to impress you of Russell’s importance through statistics, only observing that this is the same guy who spent more than a decade in indie-film purgatory after his breakthrough with “Three Kings” in 1999, which left everyone in Hollywood convinced that he was a control freak, a tyrant and/or a ditherer who was impossible to work with. His last two movies, “Silver Linings Playbook” and “The Fighter,” piled up more than a dozen Oscar nominations between them, and provided Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence and Melissa Leo with their biggest career prizes to date. Russell has gone through a peculiar career renaissance over the last few years, and is now one of Hollywood’s most reliable A-list directors, cranking out meaty, star-powered dramedies that please critics, Oscar voters and the paying public without quite feeling like pander-bear bait. Russell’s latest will strike many people as the best Scorsese movie since “Goodfellas” - and without doubt the best not actually directed by Martin Scorsese. Constructed with tremendous cinematic verve and stacking terrific performances one atop another like logs beside the Yuletide hearth, David O. ![]() ![]() But that’s no small accomplishment: what clothes, what hair and what music! Amy Adams’ succession of outrageous plunging necklines - designed to mesmerize you, and distract your focus from her mediocre English accent, while she takes your money - are worth the price of admission all by themselves. It’s entirely possible that the real subject of “American Hustle” is not double-crossing con men, widespread corruption and the uncontrolled hysteria of life in 1970s America, but simply the movie’s outfits, hairstyles and period soundtrack. ![]()
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