American Hustle

Watching American Hustle is like watching three different train wrecks happen at once, and yet there is an element of control involved that would distinguish it from an actual train wreck. First and foremost, it's a comic film that yearns to have been made in the late 70s, which is when it's set. The period detail is as conspicuous as the hair of the women in the movie, from the carefully chosen music to the glossy retro Columbia Pictures logo that plays at the beginning of the movie. That's part of the trouble: American Hustle feels too manufactured, and as such the story falters a lot. The script by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell (he also directed) is self-consciously a crime-comedy. Movies of this kind from the actual 70s weren't self-conscious. They just were. You begin to miss this element in American Hustle, because it always feels like a put-on.

But there are redeeming qualities, such as the magnificent cast: Christian Bale as a con artist with a deluxe comb-over and a striking little gut that compliments his even more striking fashion sense; Amy Adams as his mistress/cohort, a gal who affects an English accent in order to dupe clients; Bradley Cooper as a cop who's looking to get a promotion; Jennifer Lawrence as Bale's hard-drinking, hilariously out-of-control wife, who has a big nest of hair atop her head; and Jeremy Renner, a naive, well-intentioned mayor from New Jersey, who unwittingly becomes part of the cop's plan to entrap a bunch of politicians and mobsters.

David O. Russell's brand of comedy is hard to take sometimes. He's big on letting his characters ramble their way to a point, and you really miss clever, quick, flashy dialogue when that happens. On the other hand, there are some pretty funny lines in American Hustle, and many of them fall out of Lawrence's mouth like little flecks of verbal dynamite. Half the time you aren't aware of how funny they are, and just how loopy her character is. She really colors the film.

Bale is appropriately pathetic-looking as a lifelong scammer, he of the hyper-real performance. (I'm quite prepared to believe that he put on weight so he could have a real belly.) The movie doesn't take him too seriously, but it also doesn't completely dismiss him, which feels like loyalty on its own terms. Bradley Cooper, on the other hand, is always some degree of Bradley Cooper. (His character wears curlers at night, which is a good example of how the film can be uproariously funny when it wants to be.) They do play off each other well.

The overall results for me, were mixed. There were moments I laughed loud and long, and moments where I felt bored by what seemed like deliberate chaos. It's a whirlwind of a movie, and admittedly a well-made one. Linus Sandgren was the director of photography. His work is solid: American Hustle has panache and charm and sexy camera angles to spare. But there is something hollow inside of it, like director David Russell was grasping at becoming the next Coppola or Scorcese, and not quite hard enough. With Elisabeth Röhm, Robert De Niro, Jack Huston, Louis C.K., Alessandro Nivola, and Colleen Camp. ★★½

Valley Girl

Valley Girl (1983) is sort of a critique of 80's teenage materialism and the rigid social hierarchy that exists in high schools. It's also a romantic comedy about two people from different social spheres. But more than anything, Valley Girl is a leisurely stroll through a particular time and place, the Valley circa 1982, where well-to-do teenage girls spend their afternoons and weekends racking up debt on their parents' credit cards at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, speaking in a kind of other-worldly dialect that's equal parts ridiculous and amusing. 

The main "Valley Girl" is played by Deborah Foreman, who's a charming actress but whose character, Julie, is only slightly less vapid than the rest of her superficial girlfriends. Julie is dating the typical jock-douche bag, Tommy (Michael Bowen, who seems made for parts like this), but is tired of the way he treats her. So when she sees Randy (Nicolas Cage), who's more punk than preppie, crashing one of her friends' parties, she decides to pursue a romantic relationship with him, even though he's "different." Randy takes Julie outside the Valley and exposes her to different sub-cultures and this all serves as an eye-opening experience for her, but she's pressured by her friends to dump him because dating an outsider will not do.

It's hard to feel very invested in Julie's plight, and while Nicolas Cage, whose puppy dog face is the primary reason for his charm, is believable as the alluring outcast-lover, he's also a bit obsessive. (On the other hand, he's genuinely devoted to Julie where Tommy is interested in having a girlfriend for his own selfish reasons.) Randy's plan to win Julie back fails until the end when he crashes the prom and punches out Tommy. Immediately, Julie goes back to him. There was never much of a strong case for staying with Tommy, anyway. However, Valley Girl doesn't have enough good ideas in its script to make its plot come together. It all just sort of lies there and lumbers along. There are funny bits thrown in--typical of director Martha Coolidge's films--and viewers will appreciate Valley Girl more for its bubblegum flavor than its staying power. It's a fun movie but it never manages to rise about the valley girl shallowness it half-heartedly seeks to make fun of. 

There's an amusing sub-plot involving one of Julie's friends, Suzi (Michelle Meyrink), who's vying for the attention of a boy named Skip (David Ensor), but must compete with her beautiful young stepmom. The supporting cast includes Elizabeth Daily, Cameron Dye, Heidi Holicker, Lee Purcell, Joyce Hyser, and Colleen Camp and Frederic Forrest as Julie's ex-hippy parents. Written by Wayne Crawford and Andrew Lane. 99 min. ★★½

Clue

Clue (1985) is, I think, the kind of movie you appreciate more as a kid than as an adult. From my grown-up mind, it seems pretty hair-brained to try and adapt a board game into a movie. But I remember how thrilled I was to discover, retroactively you might say, that someone had turned my favorite murder-mystery-board-game into a feature film, a comedy no less, with some of my favorite actors!

Madeline Kahn, the underrated, red-headed beauty with that unmistakable voice (Megan Mullally may be her distant cousin), donning a black wig as Mrs. White; and Lesley Ann Warren, who I remembered from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella. Warren and Kahn both have beautiful singing voices, but neither of them ever really got to do as much with their voices in the movies (at least, not as much as I would have liked). There was Kahn's astonishingly funny and naughty performance as Lily Von Schtpp, the German saloon singer a la Marlene Dietrich, in Blazing Saddles, and Warren's effortless-looking performance as a floozy with a shrill, unsophisticated voice (not unlike Jean Hagen's in Singin' in the Rain) in Victor/Victoria, but as much as their talents were on display in these films, these women were never really given their due.

I think both of them shine in Clue, which isn't a particularly sophisticated comedy. It's not even a very well-thought-out comic mystery, about as subtle as Neil Simon's amusing but misfired Murder By Death. In Clue, Lesley Ann Warren plays Miss Scarlet, and she looks stunning and comfortable playing a cool bad girl, someone who once ran a brothel in Washington D.C. Warren is at her best here because she's not acting the dumb blonde: I think she's funnier when she's smart. And Kahn, as Mrs. White, delivers a subtly insane performance that may not stand out next to Lily from Blazing Saddles or Elizabeth from Young Frankenstein, and yet it's appropriately weird and Kahn-esque.

The plot of Clue is about what you'd expect from a movie adaptation of a game. The six suspects (Colonel Mustard, Mrs. Peacock, Professor Plum, et al) are gathered at an ominous Victorian mansion on a dark and stormy night (the film is needlessly set in 1954 so that it can exhaust the already exhausted limits of the comic value of the Red Scare and J. Edgar Hoover). They are confronted with various crimes (a la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None) and then it's revealed that the seventh guest, Mr. Boddy, is blackmailing all of them. Pretty soon, Boddy winds up dead, and the task of figuring out whodunit is put on them.

The jokes are hit and miss, and the story itself fizzles out long before the movie ends. But the performances make it worth seeing, particularly that of Tim Curry, as the butler and the man who's ultimately running the show. Curry's energy is unmatched. He's like a wind-up toy that keeps going and going despite all the punishing efforts of the children who are winding him up and laughing every time he runs into a wall or falls on his face. Eileen Brennan, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Christopher Lloyd, Colleen Camp, and Lee Ving co-star. Written by the director, Jonathan Lynn, from a story idea by John Landis, and produced by Debra Hill. ★★½