David O. Russell
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Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Directed by John Badham
influenced American Hustle (2013)
Visuals Characters
Stylistically and spiritually, American Hustle belongs in the same camp as vintage Scorsese and Saturday Night Fever .
Though American Hustle resembles Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino in certain particulars of plot and milieu (but not in its visual style, which is more functional than Scorsese-ecstatic), the real touchstones for its outer-borough shenanigans are Saturday Night Fever and the Sidney Lumet films Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon : manic street operas, in which the arias were Italians and Jews shouting at one another.
Sprucing up like John Travolta getting ready for the disco in “Saturday Night Fever” (which came out in the same period in which this movie is set), Cooper wears a medallion on his exposed chest.
It evokes both the Copacabana scene in “Goodfellas” and “Saturday Night Fever”.
If you used the word “hustle” in the period when this caper movie is set – the “Saturday Night Fever” ’70s – you would have been referring to a dance, not a con.
There’s similar all-in commitment by Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence, who all dress and comport themselves as if they wandered off the set of Saturday Night Fever .
Hence the “Rocky” franchise, and hence the conventional climax of “The Fighter,” with Micky confronting an Irishman named Shae Neary (Anthony Molinari), who appears to be hewn from basalt.
Nor does he fill his story with phony, “Rocky”-like uplift.
The primal thrill of great boxing movies - Body and Soul and The Set-Up, Rocky and Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby and Somebody Up There Likes Me - cannot be denied.
(The anti-Rocky, Raging Bull garnered precious few kudos back in 1980; great filmmaking aside, theres nothing feel-good about Martin Scorseses portrait of Jake LaMotta.)
, whose career, as managed by his scabrous mom Alice ( Melissa Leo ) and cokehead trainer and older half brother Dicky Eklund (Bale), is rocky (and "Rocky") at best.
So in that sense, Rocky, The Wrestler, Fat City, Cinderella Man, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and even a Mike Tyson documentary are all more or less the same.
(Its surreal level of energy, akin to that of “Goodfellas,” makes for one of the few valid reasons to compare Russell’s romp to any work by Scorsese.)
American Hustle seems to be getting compared to Goodfellas , but I see it more in the vein of Ocean’s Eleven .
Call it a rip-off or call it an homage, but let’s call it what it is: Goodfellas and Casino cut with Donnie Brasco ’s bromance and Boogie Nights ’ ’70s fetishism.
Further complicating it all are the con man's mercurial wife (Jennifer Lawrence from The Hunger Games, deftly shooting insults instead of arrows) and the mayor of Camden, N.J. (Jeremy Renner, his hair channeling Joe Pesci's in Goodfellas), a basically decent man ensnared by the scam.
Unlike Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990), a film to which American Hustle is being compared, Russell’s film never breaks through the razzle-dazzle of the surface.
Reminiscent of the panoramic sweep of Scorsese epics like Goodfellas and Casino (with a dash of Paul Thomas Anderson’s equally ’70s-retro Boogie Nights thrown in as well), American Hustle incorporates occasional voiceover and familiar period-specific song choices on the soundtrack to evoke an era but also give a grandness to the story.
Casino (1995)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced American Hustle (2013)
Themes Plot Characters Visuals
While many a filmmaker have ripped off Goodfellas (including Scorsese himself with his 1995 crime thriller Casino ), O. Russell has delivered a spiritual cousin in American Hustle that while tapping the same themes of capitalism & the pursuit of happiness the “American way”, it beats a stronger heartbeat thanks to the conflicted, sincere nature of these characters, and features a larger, sweeping scope where the hustlers, the government, the feds and the mob all fall for the same hypocrisy.
Call it a rip-off or call it an homage, but let’s call it what it is: Goodfellas and Casino cut with Donnie Brasco ’s bromance and Boogie Nights ’ ’70s fetishism.
Jennifer Lawrence, ( The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) perfectly channels a Casino -era Sharon Stone.
Reminiscent of the panoramic sweep of Scorsese epics like Goodfellas and Casino (with a dash of Paul Thomas Anderson’s equally ’70s-retro Boogie Nights thrown in as well), American Hustle incorporates occasional voiceover and familiar period-specific song choices on the soundtrack to evoke an era but also give a grandness to the story.
Though American Hustle resembles Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino in certain particulars of plot and milieu (but not in its visual style, which is more functional than Scorsese-ecstatic), the real touchstones for its outer-borough shenanigans are Saturday Night Fever and the Sidney Lumet films Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon : manic street operas, in which the arias were Italians and Jews shouting at one another.
David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” is about that kind of superficial subterfuge, both in the fascinating story it tells and even in its filmmaking, as Russell clearly cribs from Martin Scorsese films like “GoodFellas” and “Casino” like a forger copying a Rembrandt.
Boogie Nights (1997)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced American Hustle (2013), Three Kings (1999), I ♥ Huckabees (2004)
Visuals Plot
Call it a rip-off or call it an homage, but let’s call it what it is: Goodfellas and Casino cut with Donnie Brasco ’s bromance and Boogie Nights ’ ’70s fetishism.
Reminiscent of the panoramic sweep of Scorsese epics like Goodfellas and Casino (with a dash of Paul Thomas Anderson’s equally ’70s-retro Boogie Nights thrown in as well), American Hustle incorporates occasional voiceover and familiar period-specific song choices on the soundtrack to evoke an era but also give a grandness to the story.
The true story is bizarre enough, yet it's clear from the outset that director David O Russell's primary touchstones are cinematic, most notably, Scorsese's Goodfellas as seen through the refractive prism of Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights , with a smidgen of Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco sprinkled in as seasoning.
The vicarious enjoyment of being bad that American Hustle provides gives it a vague kinship with Goodfellas , while its buoyant narrative energy and disco-era setting recall Boogie Nights .
When the film ventures off into back stories and character origins, it plays like a parody of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights , lacking any emotional connection.
While the film may invite comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights or Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, Russell's is a singular, irrepressible and intriguingly off-kilter vision.
The scene that follows this unabashed request, with Adams and Cooper gyrating to “I Feel Love” at a strobe-lit disco, is more than simple era-evoking: It conveys the feral energy between the two, with Richie never certain whether or not he’s being played by Sydney (whose British alias, Lady Edith Grassley, is clearly a nod to the title flimflammer in Preston Sturges’s peerless 1941 screwball comedy, The Lady Eve) and too turned on to really care.
She left Phoenix, adopted what she thought sounded like a posh English accent and, perhaps in tribute to Barbara Stanwyck’s aristocratic alter ego in The Lady Eve , called herself Lady Edith Greenley.
In that respect, there’s a dash of Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve” (Adams’ on-and-off British accent plays like an homage to Barbara Stanwyck) in a picture that otherwise suggests an Altmanesque spin on “The Sting.”
There are whiffs of Preston Sturges in the strong, willful female characters and rumbustious physical and interpersonal comedy, as well as the element of the virtuoso scammers scamming other scammers hailing toward both Sturges’ “The Lady Eve” and the definitive comedy clockwork of Ernst Lubitsch and Samson Raphaelson’s “Trouble in Paradise.”
We get a glimmer of the error of the newfound optimism of the protagonist of Silver Linings Playbook when he throws a hardcover copy of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms through the closed window of his bedroom in his parents' attic.
This leads, however, to Pat flinging a copy of “A Farewell to Arms” through a closed window at 4 o’clock in the morning, and awakening his parents with a maniacal rant against Ernest Hemingway.
In one hilarious scene early on in the film, an enraged Pat bursts in to his parents’ bedroom and rails against Ernest Hemingway’s heartbreaking ending in “A Farewell To Arms”.
The film is also what we would like to call a scam-edy, a mix of jocularity and plot twists, of the type that has powered starry Hollywood vehicles like “The Sting,” movies in which the acting, characters and glamorous patina are so distracting that viewers won’t notice till the end—if they even care—that they’ve had their reality hijacked by a brilliantly constructed con game ABOUT a brilliantly constructed con game.
In that respect, there’s a dash of Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve” (Adams’ on-and-off British accent plays like an homage to Barbara Stanwyck) in a picture that otherwise suggests an Altmanesque spin on “The Sting.”
Unlike other films about confidence men such as “The Sting” or “Paper Moon”, the humor in “American Hustle” is conceptual rather than so old-fashioned as to rest on witty dialogue or farcical situations.
The Sting (1973) had a satisfying payoff.
Cowriter (with "The International's" Eric Singer)/director David O. Russell ("Silver Linings Playbook") gives his latest, loosely based on Abscam, a tone of cocaine-fueled conning that plays like an updated screwball romantic comedy version of "The Sting" structured like Scorcese's 70's set "Goodfellas."
The result is an entertaining screwball caper film that wants you to think of "The Sting," Preston Sturges and that Scorsese fella.
American Hustle seems to be getting compared to Goodfellas , but I see it more in the vein of Ocean’s Eleven .
Dexterously plotted and laced with choice dialogue, the film is a crime drama infused with the spirit of a caper comedy, its frisky insouciance at times not unlike Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven remake.
While the same can obviously be said about those played by the likes of George Clooney and his pals in the super-slick remake of "Ocean's Eleven," the ones here feel far more human, warts and all.
Hey, Soderbergh ("Ocean's Eleven"), you want a shot at this?
It’s one part Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and one part Ocean’s Eleven to two parts Boogie Nights ; it takes a while to find the film beneath all that familiarity.
Part Full Metal Jacket , part Platoon , part Three Kings , Jarhead -- based on the memoirs of Gulf War veteran Anthony Swofford--examines what happens when men, primed for war, are thwarted from ever seeing any action.
Even David O. Russell’s "Three Kings" is off limits for resemblance because of the psychologically surgical way "Jarhead" allows its audience to realize its protagonist’s dilemmas that inform his transition into antagonist.
Jarhead is inferior to David O. Russell's Three Kings and lacks the dramatic firepower of Apocalypse Now and Platoon.
Likewise, the film's Desert Storm setting has already been explored by the superior "Three Kings."
Worth seeing, then, but if it’s politics you’re after, you’re better off with Three Kings.
Raging Bull (1980)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced The Fighter (2010), American Hustle (2013)
Visuals Themes Plot
Here, Weinberg has been transformed into Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), a balding, paunchy Bronx Jew whose intricate taming of his unwieldy comb-over is like Russell’s answer to the dressing-room sequence from Raging Bull .
Boxing has often been the subject matter of many films but few have captured the good and the bad of the sport as clearly as The Fighter, which can stand up to comparison with classics such as Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall.
The primal thrill of great boxing movies - Body and Soul and The Set-Up, Rocky and Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby and Somebody Up There Likes Me - cannot be denied.
(The anti-Rocky, Raging Bull garnered precious few kudos back in 1980; great filmmaking aside, theres nothing feel-good about Martin Scorseses portrait of Jake LaMotta.)
That's because we've already seen many of the boxing movies – from "The Set-Up" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me" to "Rocky" and "Raging Bull" – that "The Fighter" draws on.
Russell, cast, and crew supply local color till it's coming out our ears, but Micky's story is no threat to, say, Million Dollar Baby, let alone Raging Bull.
It combines the mercenary workings of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" with the "The Red Badge of Courage."
But, this is a fantasy rags-to-riches, brothers-in-competition saga that bargains on its “Rocky” and “The Fighter” influences, but tries to be more intense, and less inspirational, than its predecessors.
Like last year's “The Fighter” (to which it will inevitably be compared), “Warrior” serves up a solid rebuttal to anyone who would argue that a “fight movie” can’t be intelligent, impressively acted and multi-faceted.
The easiest way to describe The Warrior is to imagine The Fighter with more kicking and less crack.
As with last year's Oscar-winner The Fighter , Warrior uses a very physical sport as a means to bring two brothers together.
But for all of its supposed realism and reflection of hard times in America, the movie plays out as complete fairy-tale nonsense—exactly the kind of thing that “The Fighter” was fighting to get away from (even as it partially embraced it).
Shamelessly ripping off “The Fighter,” “Warrior” is also about professional brawlers, inept parenting, overcoming substance abuse and sibling rivalry: Estranged years ago by an alcoholic father (Nick Nolte) now in recovery, the two Conlon brothers, Brendan ( Joel Edgerton ) and Tommy ( Tom Hardy ), will almost inevitably meet again in an Atlantic City mixed-martial-arts cage-match event called Sparta.
The screenplay abounds in convolutions that undercut expectations and take matters in new directions, including a major one toward the close that Russell and Singer might have borrowed from Peter Stone’s “Charade.”
Southpaw (2015)
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
influenced by The Fighter (2010), American Hustle (2013)
Plot Themes
Director Antoine Fuqua ( Training Day , The Equalizer ), working from an overcooked screenplay by Kurt Sutter ( Sons of Anarchy ), knows he's not in the same ring with Raging Bull, Rocky, Million Dollar Baby and The Fighter, though the script unblushingly mooches from each of them.
On the downside, whole chunks of “Southpaw” have been lifted from other films: “The Champ” (boxer-child love story), the “Rocky” franchise (an opponent, played by Miguel Gomez, who is less character than arrogant supervillain), “Raging Bull” (the way the camera artfully dwells on Billy’s bruised/defiant features), “The Fighter” (how family and friends can nurture or gnaw at a boxer).
It's been done a thousand times, including such famous performers as Wallace Beery in "The Champ," Kirk Douglas in "Champion," Sylvester Stallone in "Rocky," Michelle Rodriguez in "Girlfight," Hilary Swank in "Million Dollar Baby" and Mark Wahlberg in "The Fighter."
Throughout the years, boxing movies have been synonymous with tales of redemption – from “Rocky,” to “Raging Bull,” to “The Fighter” – and Antoine Fuqua’s “Southpaw” is no different.
The only real problem is that occasional feeling of strained seriousness - as if the movie were trying way too hard to be, if not "Raging Bull," than at least "The Fighter."
He’s now where Christian Bale was before The Fighter and American Hustle: an aggressive mannerist.
Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)
Directed by Preston Sturges
influenced Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
More than any other Hollywood filmmaker, Russell has demonstrated a facility with nutty situations, screwball energy, and eccentric characters, the kind of facility that recalls Sturges in his Hail the Conquering Hero and Miracle of Morgan’s Creek heyday, the kind that approximates the manic farce of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot together with the acerbic wit and sentiment of The Apartment.
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced I ♥ Huckabees (2004), Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
Themes Visuals
I'm not sure I've seen a romance so imbued with this much danger since Punch-Drunk Love.
The added coincidence of finding Vivian and Bernard Jaffe's business card in a borrowed dinner jacket sends him to their door (after wondering through mazelike plain white corridors right out of "Punch-Drunk Love").
Huckabees certainly matches the off-kilter rhythms of Punch-Drunk Love and has a dizzying digital editing strategy that suggests Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind .
Mr. Scorsese once called Walsh’s 1939 post-World-War-I crime film, “ The Roaring Twenties ,” a “twisted Horatio Alger story,” a thumbnail description that also fits “American Hustle.”
My Man Godfrey (1936)
Directed by Gregory La Cava
influenced Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
Characters
Tiffany may not really be a lot more than a variation on, most obviously, Carole Lombard’s dizzy rich girl in My Man Godfrey (1936), but the character has more depth — and more pain — than you see in that earlier form.
The Graduate (1967)
Directed by Mike Nichols
influenced Silver Linings Playbook (2012), Spanking the Monkey (1994)
Plot Themes
If, nearly 30 years ago, "The Graduate" was shocking in its portrayal of a May-December affair, "Spanking the Monkey," which is a sort of a '90s riff on that earlier film, raises the stakes by dealing with masturbation and incest.
THE REBELLIOUS '60s had "The Graduate," the yupwardly mobile '80s had "Risky Business."
Sometimes when the anger erupts to the surface, “Silver Linings Playbook” is reminiscent of psychodramas such as Mike Nichols’ adaptation of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” but mostly it’s modeled on the gentler eccentricities of Nichols’ “The Graduate” and kindred ’60s and ’70s flicks such as “Harold and Maude.”