All-star cast has a ball keeping the twists coming in David O. Russell’s 1970s-set AMERICAN HUSTLE
AMERICAN HUSTLE (David O. Russell, 2013)
Hudson River Park, Pier 63 lawn at 23rd St.
Wednesday, July 16, free, dusk
www.riverflicks.com
www.americanhustle-movie.com
Combining cast members from his previous two hits, Silver Linings Playbook and
The Fighter, which garnered fifteen Academy Award nominations and three wins between them, David O. Russell scores big again with American Hustle. Inspired by a true story — the film opens by playfully declaring “Some of this actually happened” — American Hustle is set in 1978, focusing on smarmy con man Irving Rosenfeld (a dynamic Christian Bale), a paunchy small-timer with a spectacular comb-over and ultra-cool, ever-present shades who is pulling off low-level dirty deals first by himself, then with a new partner, the sexy-beautiful Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams, channeling a young Nicole Kidman), who also goes by the name Lady Edith Greensly. Soon the Feds come calling, and FBI agent Richie DiMaso (a superbly coiffed Bradley Cooper) gives them little choice but to take part in a sting involving Camden mayor Carmine Polito (a wonderfully wigged Jeremy Renner), a fake Arab sheikh (Michael Peña), several congressmen (including one played by longtime character actor Anthony Zerbe), and a major mobster (a surprise, uncredited appearance by a two-time Oscar winner doing what he does best). While Richie falls for Edith — they have one heckuva night at Studio 54 — Irving has to deal with his shrewish, demanding wife (a scene-stealing Jennifer Lawrence) as he develops a real fondness for Carmine. As in the best caper flicks, Russell (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings), who rewrote Eric Warren Singer’s original script (there is also substantial improvisation by the outstanding cast), keeps the twists coming, leaving the audience guessing who’s conning who up to the very last minute. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography, Michael Wilkinson’s fab costumes, Judy Becker’s spot-on production design, and the period-heavy soundtrack (featuring songs by Elton John, the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Tom Jones, America, Wings, and others) capture the late 1970s in all its bizarre glory, with no detail overlooked. Bale is sensational as Irving, giving the role a heartfelt depth, while Adams, in boob-baring dresses, and Lawrence, in gorgeous, upswept blond hair, are superb as the strong women he is caught between. An expertly made movie that celebrates the art of filmmaking itself, American Hustle might be a fictionalized version of what really went down, but everything about it rings absolutely true. Nominated for ten Oscars but shut out of the winners circle, American Hustle is screening July 16 at Hudson River Park’s Pier 63 as part of the free River Flicks: Big Hit Wednesdays series, which continues through August 20 with such other 2013 movies as This Is the End, Lone Survivor, and Captain Phillips. For a day-by-day listing of free summer movie screenings throughout New York City, go here.
For more than half a century, Hollywood has remade a plethora of Asian films, from The Magnificent Seven (Seven Samurai) to The Departed (Infernal Affairs), from Shall We Dance? (Sharu wi Dansu?) to The Grudge (Ju-On), among so many others. But there’s a relatively new trend in which Japan, Korea, and China are now remaking American films, including Ghost: Mouichido Dakishimetai (Ghost), Wo Zhi Nv Ren Xin (What Women Want), and Saidoweizu (Sideways). One of the latest, and best, is Japanese-born Korean director Lee Sang-il’s spectacularly honest and faithful remake of Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Oscar-winning revisionist Western, Unforgiven — in some ways returning the favor of Eastwood’s having starred in Sergio Leone’s 1964 spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. In Unforgiven, Ken Watanabe, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Last Samurai and starred in Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, plays Jubei Kamata, the Japanese version of Eastwood’s William Munny.
Director Francis Lawrence’s modern-day update of Richard Matheson’s classic 1954 novel, I Am Legend, is a tense, nonstop thriller, liberally adapted by screenwriters Mark Protosevich (The Cell) and Akiva Goldsman (I, Robot). While the book was a claustrophobic masterpiece, the film opens things up dramatically, with Robert Neville (Will Smith), the last survivor of a supposed cancer cure that turned into a deadly virus, riding the streets of New York City every day in a fancy car with his dog, Sam. In addition to hunting wild game that leaps through Midtown, Neville, an army scientist who is still searching for an antidote in his makeshift basement laboratory, kills cells of infected vampiric beings that have more in common with the violent creatures of 28 Days Later than the slow-moving zombies of Night of the Living Dead. Every night Neville barricades himself and Sam into their apartment overlooking Washington Square Park and dreams of the events that brought him to this point, centered on his desperate attempt to save his wife (Salli Richardson) and daughter (Willow Smith, Will’s real-life daughter). I Am Legend was actually filmed in New York, with pivotal scenes shot in and around Madison Square Park, Grand Central Terminal, the South Street Seaport, and a barren Park Ave., lending it a stark, frightening reality. Smith excels as Neville, his eyes quickly shifting from hope to disappointment, from promise to pain, and Lawrence (Constantine, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) does a marvelous job of translating the book’s inner monologue into a postapocalyptic visual nightmare. I Am Legend is screening July 12 at one of the film’s locations, the South Street Seaport, as part of the “Front/Row Cinema: See/Change” series, which continues Wednesday and Saturday nights through August 31. For a day-by-day listing of free summer movie screenings throughout New York City, go 
It’s hard to believe that the Hays Code, a set of standards initiated by two religious figures and named after chief censor Will H. Hays, was enacted and enforced, to varying degrees, in Hollywood from 1934 all the way up to 1968. One of the best examples of the racier pre-code films is William A. Wellman’s rarely screened 1931 doozy, Night Nurse. The first of five collaborations between Wellman and Barbara Stanwyck, Night Nurse, based on Dora Macy’s 1930 novel, stars Stanwyck as Lora Hart, a young woman determined to become a nurse. She gets a probationary job at a city hospital, where she is taken under the wing of Maloney (Joan Blondell), who likes to break the rules and torture the head nurse, the stodgy Miss Dillon (Vera Lewis). Shortly after treating a bootlegger (Ben Lyon) for a gunshot wound and agreeing not to report it to the police, Lora starts working for a shady doctor (Ralf Harolde) taking care of two sick children (Marcia Mae Jones and Betty Jane Graham) whose proudly dipsomaniac mother (Charlotte Merriam) is being manipulated by her suspicious chauffeur (Clark Gable). Wellman pulls out all the stops, hinting at or simply depicting murder, child endangerment, rape, alcoholism, lesbianism, physical brutality, and Blondell and Stanwyck regularly frolicking around in their undergarments. It’s as if Wellman is thumbing his nose directly at the upcoming Hays Code in scene after scene. Although far from his best film — Wellman directed such classics as Wings (1927), The Public Enemy (1931), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Beau Geste (1939), and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) — Night Nurse is an overly melodramatic, dated, but entertaining little tale with quite a surprise ending. Night Nurse is screening July 11 as part of the Rubin Museum’s Cabaret Cinema series “Movie Medicine: A Film Series about the Healing Factor in Cinema,” being held in conjunction with the “Bodies in Balance: The Art of Tibetan Medicine” exhibition, and will be introduced by Edna Igoe of the New York Professional Nurses Union. The series continues July 18 with Woody Allen’s Sleeper, introduced by psychotherapist Maggie Robbins, July 25 with Arthur Hiller’s The Hospital, introduced by Dr. Kenneth Perrine, and August 1 with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, introduced by award-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
