Thanks, Chadwick!
That’s good to know.
Was anybody else wondering why they talked about running away to Romania? :dubious: I know Ceaușescu was popular in the West, but Romania was still a brutal (even by the standards of the Eastern Bloc) dictatorship. Then again most Communist countries were pretty welcoming to Western tourist bearing hard currency, but it still seems really weird for a fugitive couple to basically want to retire there.
I really expected to like this movie, and I’m surprised that I didn’t at all. It was all surface. There was no depth and in a lot of places it played as a period-piece-by-numbers: they spent tons of money on costumes and getting the hair right, and every time something dramatic happened it was punctuated by another Famous Song from the Era, but the story didn’t make sense and (partly for that reason) I wasn’t compelled the characters or by their relationships. Maybe they got stuck halfway between being a really serious period drama and being a heist movie, where you admire the cleverness of the characters but you don’t feel there’s that much at stake. Argo landed in that zone, too, to its detriment. But in places that movie built up some real tension. American Hustle never did that, and to me it never really added up to anything.
This about summed it up for me. Definitely not worthy of the hype, but also better than average. Good, but not great.
Watched it last night. I too thought the, “Where are you now?” line on the phone was a gaff and it took me out of the movie at that moment. I thought the barrage of hit songs from the era was very distracting for some reason. I was also confused by the plotting - the who’s conning who? “The Sting” did this much better, or maybe my mind was younger and sharper when I saw “The Sting”.