Review of American Hustle (2013) by Subseq — 21 Dec 2013

You are kidding me. This movie is one of the best? Odds-on favorite for best picture? Who are these professional reviewers? Ahh, yes, they are of that postmodernist breed who like nonsense disguised as cinematic art.

Sorry, but this was a mess. To start you had three character narration tracks, Irving, Richie, and Sydney all had their turns--a director's shot at cutting-edge experimentation that was just stupid. Then there was the uneven smattering of Pulp Fiction-like time exploitation which just made it disjointed.

The main blight was this now typical fixation with showcasing people doing stunningly insipid things then forcing us to gaze at others trying to cope in wildly emotional ways. This drives me crazy. The attempt at some penetrating authenticity with mere random and painfully distended melodrama was so contrived I just want to puke at the screen.

You saw the same thing with Silver Linings Playbook and I hated that movie for the same reason. Yet I keep reading how David O. Russell is so wonderful, so I thought I'd give him another chance and see if this would be different.

It wasn't. It gets a "2" rating because it did get tepidly interesting with the mob involvement there for a bit, as well as some of the con artist twists.