Inspired by the FBI’s Abscam operation of the late ’70s, American Hustle (2013), according to its own announcement after the credits, “is a work of fiction.”  It is unconcerned with historical re-creation.  Too, for all the focus on corruption, it is not a work of moral import, but it does do a good job of demonstrating that in life there is comedy even where there is crime: specifically, fraud.  And even where there is a painful love triangle.  This triangle involves two con artists (Christian Bale and Amy Adams) and the FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) who offers them impunity if they will help engineer four big-time arrests.

The characters are fun—and, better, fascinating—in this mercurial David O. Russell film as gratifyingly commercial as Russell’s previous pic, Silver Linings Playbook.  Direction and editing here make for an outstandingly constructed product, and the main actors are either commandingly “natural” (Adams and Bale, in that order) or passionately credible (e.g. Jennifer Lawrence).

It may be Russell’s best movie to date.  It ain’t perfect, it ain’t profound, but . . . it’s riveting.  And it’s eccentric in that the women look sexy and the men, by virtue of the ’70s, look laughable.

Cover of Amy Adams

I have no interest in seeing the 2013 remake of Carrie, starring Chloe Grace Moretz, but the Village Voice review of it (from October) does interest me.  In particular the following two sentences grabbed my attention:

“When De Palma shot the original [Carrie] in 1976, the sexual revolution had trickled down to the suburbs.  Today, a new puritanism is trickling back up, with politicians and religious leaders trying to keep a new generation of young women from learning how their bodies work.”

Of course this is preposterous.  Carrie in the movie was never taught about menstruation.  So there are politicians and religious leaders fighting the practice of teaching menstruation to today’s real-life Carries?  Are they “trying to keep” them from learning about intercourse and contraceptives too?  Don’t look now, but somehow they’re finding out.

It is hardly worth bringing it up, but there is NO new puritanism going on today.  This is not what Hobby Lobby, worried about insurance coverage of abortion pills and not just of contraceptives, represents. 

Dream on.

Francois Truffaut’s French film The 400 Blows (1959) still impresses, and always will.  We respond favorably to its autobiography, it holds us with its detail and moves at a nice clip.  For a narrative work of art it has little to say, but the frozen-frame face of the juvenile delinquent after he has sweatily dashed to the seashore bespeaks much about being on the brink of maturity, of resignation, of personal change.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover via Amazon

Two women, both married, are gaga over a young ne’er-do-well—and commit adultery with him.  But, well, nobody’s all bad:  so does Pedro Almodovar’s Live Flesh (1997)—it should have been translated “Trembling Flesh”—remind us.

The mode is that of a serious but crazy thriller, with no shortage of intriguing or droll details (e.g., TV will frequently grab a character’s attention, even in the course of a physical fight).  Almodovar will do anything to keep our eyes glued to his footage, which is why he is a sensationalist.  Naked body time:  The big intimacy scene may well have been the most vividly sexy segment in ’97 cinema.  Some of this stark stuff doesn’t work (Angela Molina shooting Jose Sancho), but on the whole Carne Tremula is a carefree, pleasurable oddity.

(In Spanish with English subtitles)

Live Flesh (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

People who have been long unemployed in America will not be hired for nascent jobs.  Employers are not interested in them.  This is the subject of a pretty good Slate.com article by Matthew Yglesias (Dec. 11).

Yet how many times can we provide these people with federal unemployment compensation?  It’s unaffordable.  To do nothing for them, however, “is cruel and insane,” says Yglesias.  Indeed it is.  Something should be done.  Maybe one more year (2014) of unemployment comp, though at the same time I’d like to see President Obama and Congress do all they can to remove this infernal climate of uncertainty for entrepreneurs and corporations.  (Alas, Obama can’t be trusted for this.)  A proliferation of jobs—more jobs than we have workers for—is what is needed:  THIS is what will benefit the long-term unemployed.

Obamacare, thou should’st not be living at this hour.  Or any hour.