Related: “The Snow” (2013)

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.)

“I remember the video game phenomenon, probably all of you do too. The most interesting thing about the video game phenomenon to me was that within a few years after its beginning, kids and non-kids were putting two-and-a-half billion dollars worth of quarters into these things a year. You can look at these things as games and dismiss them. Or you can look at them as very simple simulated learning environments. So, as an example, in a simple pong game, the game is constantly telling you how well you’re doing by how well you score. And so the more you learn the underlying principles, the better you score. The underlying principle in the case of most of these games was fairly simple, but carry that concept much further: imagine if the underlying principles are a sophisticated macroeconomic model of how France might’ve functioned in the time of Louis XIV. This type of simulation then becomes a little less trivial than the video game, and yet the principles are still the same. And you can imagine what it would be like if we could use the historical material in the Library of Congress coupled with the interactive computer technology that we’re developing to do these things. These simulations would become what most of our students are learning from.”

10. Out of The Furnace

There’s the good guy with a gun and the bad guy with a gun. Only justice is blind and the world is ambivalent.

9. Gravity

The most brilliantly executed movie about space since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.

8. Side Effects

A deep meditation on the human stain of pharmaceuticals and mental illness, featuring Rooney Mara in the most understated role of her career.

7. Mud

The McConaissance continues.

6. Captain Phillips

The first 10 minutes of Captain Phillips feel unsettling and earnest, with (screenwriter) Billy Ray telling a lot of the things he’d be much better showing. But Captain Phillips hits its mark from that point forward, thanks in large part to an ongoing lack of grandstanding. Tom Hanks is very good, but Barkhad Abdi steals his thunder.

5. Spring Breakers

A gorgeous, rhythmic, candy-colored tragedy. Spring break. Spring break. Spring break, forever.

4. Frances Ha
Perhaps every generation should have its very own Manhattan.

3. Inside Llewyn Davis
One of several key differences between a good movie and a great one is that a good movie may entertain you for two hours, providing a variety of twist and turns, but a great one’ll stick with you for a lifetime, revealing untold secrets every time you play it over.

2. American Hustle
David O. Russell doing his best Martin Scorsese.

1. The Place Beyond The Pines

A vastly overlooked motion picture focusing on fathers and the inevitable – sometimes even inescapable – legacies they hand down to their sons. The most unexpected surprise occurs about a third of the way through. From that point forward, this triptych only grows much more intriguing.

1. Gordon Gekko is an incredibly likable egomaniac. Jordan Belfort is just an egomaniac.
2. Wall Street is a fictional story that feels vital and real. The Wolf of Wall Street is a factual story that feels passe and hyperbolic.
3. With a running time of 126 minutes, Wall Street feels incredibly tight. With a running time of 180 minutes, The Wolf of Wall Street feels unnecessarily laborious.
4. Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is Good” speech will always feel iconic. Jordan Belfort’s “Land of Opportunity” speech will always feel sardonic.
5. Most of the characters in Wall Street are pursuing their own sense of class. Most of the characters in The Wolf of Wall Street are pursuing their own sense of flash.
6. Whereas Bud Fox and his father seem well worth rooting for, The Wolf of Wall Street offers no major characters worth rooting for.
7. The Wolf of Wall Street is guilty of employing a variety of bush-league winks, including a brief cameo by the real Jordan Belfort (portraying someone else), an equally brief cameo by Fran Lebowitz (portraying someone else), and a pair of passing references to Gordon Gekko and Bud Fox.
8. Whereas Oliver Stone’s original screenplay actually elevated the performance of Charlie Sheen, Terence Winter’s bloated adaptation equally diminishes a stellar turn by Leonardo DiCaprio.
9. You never get the sense that Jordan Belfort is going anywhere but down, and – what’s infinitely worse – you never really seem to care.
10. Wall Street ends like a movie that delivers on its promises. The Wolf of Wall Street ends like a movie that ran out of financing.
11. Wall Street feels like the ambitious work of a young director on the way up. The Wolf of Wall Street feels like the overwrought work of an aging archetype facing decline.

(The Wolf of Wall Street is currently playing in theaters nationwide.)

Surprise someone today.

“The wall surrounding memory misremembered is clean and wide and high, similar in effect to the wall one finds in certain airports in other countries, clean and wide and high like that, banking in or letting go those who want to remember clearly or don’t. Passengers coming or going in the field of memory are a tangle of arms and legs, hands, hearts, hair, and minds that – if you do not stand too close or listen too carefully – speak a shared language, remarkable in its oppressive loneliness, its denial: What a horrible memory, and so forth. Regardless of where many of us believe we land – in that field encumbered by not too much baggage or entirely too much – we all come from the same place, which is a road rutted by experience so banal, nearly remarkable, that memory tricks us into remembrance of it again and again, as if experience alone were not enough. What are we to do with such a life, one in which we are not left alone to events – love, shopping, and so forth – but to the holocaust of feeling that memory,
misremembered or not, imposes on us?”

1. IFB Presents: 7 Classic Springsteen Stories That Are Well Worth Mass Retelling
2. 19 Reasons Why 6 Souls Is The Absolute Worst Movie Julianne Moore Has Ever Agreed To Be a Part Of
3. Moving On: The Year of Losing Dangerously
4. IFB Presents: The Top 20 Recurring Characters from AMC’s Breaking Bad
5. Film Capsule: What Maisie Knew
6. Good Pictures/Bad Camera: This Is Wildwood, New Jersey
7. Moving On: Every Road Leads Back to Wildwood
8. Why Laura Marling May Very Well Be The Most Important Folk Artist To Come Along in 40 Years
9. Moving On: The Vacationer
10. Good Pictures/Bad Camera: The Fog

(All 2013 images taken with a Canon PowerShot A1300 digital camera.)

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.)

David O. Russell’s American Hustle is an incredibly likable film that moves so quickly one seldom notices the lapses. By lapses I mean the fact Russell’s film is so loosely based on historical record it actually borders on absurd. How can this be, one might ask, especially given several of the public figures involved are still living? Answer: America Hustle is a byproduct of Hollywood, a billion-dollar land-of-make-believe where securing clearances and changing names represents more than ample grounds.

Based on the box office success of Inglourious Basterds – specifically, one unforgettable sequence during which, “history went one way and [Tarantino] went the other” – major studios came to recognize the skyrocketing potential for revision. The primary issue being only a handful of screenwriters – and even fewer directors – maintain the delicate touch of a Quentin Tarantino. As such, what most studios end up with is a schizophrenic chunk of cinema, one in which the truth is simultaneously slipping both in and out of focus. Uproariously entertaining, if not utter hogwash, all the same.

Enter American Hustle – a screenplay that’s so expertly taut historical record never really seems to matter. Here we find David O. Russell doing his best Martin Scorsese – all quick cuts and dolly shots, multiple zooms and montages. Hustle‘s storytelling is non-linear and it’s related via the perspective of two essential narrators. The result is a furiously-paced bonanza, one in which Russell is clearly encouraging his entire cast to go for broke. To that end, Hustle‘s A-List ensemble is a shoe-in for multiple Oscar nods. Here now – in that spirit – is a breakdown of American Hustle‘s five principal cast members, listed in descending order based on how vigorously each one deserves an individual Academy Award:

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