American Hustle

American Hustle fits the same niche as Wolf of Wall Street, a more-or-less comedy based more-or-less on historical events. Hustle is a couple of years earlier than Wolf, starting in 1978 and covering the ABSCAM investigation from the point of view of the con-man the FBI pressured into helping them. The movie opens with "SOME OF THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED" in big Helvetica letters to let you know it will deviate from the truth. (Closing credits are not in Helvetica.)

There is tension, drama, humor, no nudity but so much revealing clothing you might think there was nudity, cons and graft and manipulation, and a good cast. Also, unusual for film, we see the characters doing a lot of hair grooming. It opens with the effort Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) puts into his toupee / comb-over combination. We see at least two other characters in hair curlers and Rosenfeld has other (smaller) hair grooming scenes. Hair is apparently being used to metaphorically emphasize how fake these characters are.

Four out of five open-to-the-navel tops (four on Amy Adams, one on Richie DiMaso).

Before the movie were several trailers, only one of which was new to me and also intriguing: Dom Hemingway. Jude Law doesn't look like Jude Law here, which is a change from his normal. His on screen pal is played Richard E. Grant (looking old) and Grant is always a welcome sight. According to IMDB, Jude Law and Christian Bale both gained a lot of weight (30 and 40 pounds respectively) for these roles. Maybe that's why they seem so different in them.

American Hustle at IMDB

Wolf of Wall Street at IMDB

Helvetica at IMDB

Dom Hemingway at IMDB

Final thought: also interesting in the trailers was Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest

Lego Movie

Technical observations about the computer graphic animation of this movie. It has a very stop motion look.

I grabbed a clip of Cloud Cuckoo Land from youtube and examined it.

Some, but not all, of the motion is only ever other frame. In particular fast moving things and the camera change ever frame, but slower things, like someone walking, hold still for two frames and then have a larger movement, then hold still for two frames again.

Here's twenty frames from the clip made into a slowed down gif:

The original frames have thousands of colors, unlike Legos proper.

If you watch the clip in some software that can go frame-by-frame advance, you can see the mixed jumpy and smooth even better. The click to advance lets you you can slow it down or speed it up as desired, and makes the frame change more obvious.

BMX Bandits

BMX Bandits (1983), perhaps best known as Nicole Kidman's first movie role, is a childish movie about some bicycle motorcross (BMX) enthusiast kids who inadvertantly get mixed up with some bumbling bank robbers. Today it could be pitched as The Goonies kids with Premium Rush bike chases. This one is full 1980s New South Wales. Drinking game: take a shot every time you see someone in a jumpsuit.

It feels like half of the movie exists to show "Can we get a bike to do this? To go here?" Down an escalator in a strip mall? Yes. Through a quarry? Yes. Jumping golfers in a sand trap? Yup. Use a VW Bug as a jump? Sure. Between tables at a pizza restaurant? You got it. Interference in a rugby game? It's there. Down a waterslide? Well, they do it, but not actually riding the bikes.

But for all of the silliness of the plot, the filming is fantastic. On the special features for Crank (Jason Stratham's Speed meets D.O.A. film between Transporter and Transporter 2), one of the two directors explains that when you put the camera in danger you make the audience feel like they are in danger. In Crank they do things like skateboard with the camera. In BMX Bandits they do things that could have inspired the GoPro people, like attach the camera to the bikes at six inches off the ground. There are times when do wonder, did the camera make it through all of the takes? The cinematographer was John Seale who has a long list of good titles: Rain Man, Dead Poets Society, The Perfect Storm, Cold Mountain, and an Oscar for his cinematography on The English Patient.

Six stolen police band walkie-talkies out of nine.

Selected links:

BMX Bandits at IMDB

Premium Rush at IMDB

Crank at IMDB

Final thought: and the movie poster screams 80s video game box / cabinet art

Bechdel Test

[responding to complaints that "The Bechdel Test" isn't useful for finding "interesting" or "enjoyable" movies, made by a retired Navy guy]

The test isn't made for you. It was a criteria a lesbian (in a comic strip) was using to decide if she would be willing to watch the movie. If watching men do manly stuff is a bucket of cold water, this can warn you away.

It's not a good metric for determining if a movie is feminist or not. The Bling Ring passes both Bechdel and reverse Bechdel, and is very much a film about the females. But the female characters in it are all exceedingly shallow and bad role models.

Where Bechdel is most useful, I think, is talking about a set of movies. Only one of the eight Harry Potter movies meets it (or so I've seen claimed, I haven't tried to figure out which one). Is that unexpected given the general outline of "Boy grows up to fight the man who killed his parents?" No. Just that outline says it is likely to be a very male centric film.

Quoting from a 2010 piece by a movie reviewer that I like (Mick LaSalle): You could say that the Bechdel test points up that women's movies are ghettoized, in that they are generally depictions of internal life, about romance, about sex, about relationships. The Bechdel test shows how few films there are that fit into the external life category. It doesn't necessarily follow that films in which women sit around talking about business, politics or crime would be any better as women's films. It is however a curious and telling thing that these films don't seem to exist.
[...]

Ultimately, of course, the only way to really gauge the presence of women in film is to take a year at random and go through every single film released. For example, in 2001, there were only 19 films out of 400 American movies made that had a woman as the main character. 19 out of 400, and some of those movies were dumb teen comedies, and one was GLITTER with Mariah Carey. Just for comparison, France released 200 films that year. 75 had a woman as the main character, and I'm not even counting silly movies like PEOPLE IN SWIMSUITS ARE NOT NECESSARILY SHALLOW, with Isabelle Gelinas and Agnes Soral. — Mick LaSalle

Final thought: comic that started the test here