Amsterdam (David O. Russell, 2022)

[Computer Raheem]

I'm mildly intrigued, though that's due to my enjoyment of the two David O. Russell films I've seen (Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees, to be specific) and the absurdly stacked cast rather that whatever is in that trailer. Truly one of the worst I've seen in a minute, and I wouldn't be surprised if it aids in the film being a box-office bomb.

Also, why is Drake an executive producer? I need an explanation.

[swo17]

I don't usually watch trailers but I watched this one to be able to tell my daughter if Taylor Swift was in it. So it succeeded in conveying that information to me. Otherwise, eh, this looks like a movie I'll watch. Not as good as the trailer for Real Life obviously

[therewillbeblus]

I'm going to remain optimistic. Russell is typically doing so much within in the films of his operating this loud (see: American Hustle) that a zany throwaway trailer like this struggles to deliver the multidimensional tone that we are almost guaranteed to be provided in some form. If anything, this trailer seems to be stumbling over itself trying to do two things I don't care about: giving the audience a slice of plot to digest by oversimplifying what is obviously complicated (and failing miserably at that), and showing off the colorful cast. The trailer is clearly not interested in communicating the depths of what Russell is interested in communicating with his films, and so I expect the film will be much different in motion. Then again, I like most if not all of Russell's films to some degree, including his almost universally-maligned Nailed!/Accidental Love, so proceeding with caution is not my instinct here

[swo17]

Actually, I think most people here like Nailed more than American Hustle (or certainly The Fighter)

[therewillbeblus]

Really? I've tried to search around the forum outside its dedicated thread and keep coming up empty in finding anyone except domino as a fellow fan. Can you point me to a place where Nailed! has been discussed by more members, simply for my own benefit after so many failed quests?

[swo17]

Maybe I over-remembered the amount of enthusiasm in that thread, but I'm a fan and I never mentioned it there

[therewillbeblus]

I'm a fan

[domino harvey]

No, I’m the voice of the people, that’s all you need

[knives]

This is a good reminder to try to check it out.

[cdnchris]

No, I’m the voice of the people, that’s all you need

I'm guessing you're the person mentioned in that one news segment in Soderbergh's Schizopolis, the final arbiter on taste who decides "what clothes everyone should wear, what movies suck and whether bald men who grow ponytails should still get laid."

[Never Cursed]

Also, why is Drake an executive producer? I need an explanation.

Like many people in entertainment with a stupid amount of money, Drake has recently ventured into film and television production, with his co-manager Future The Prince handling the business side of his production shingle DreamCrew. Probably their biggest success with this company has been Sam Levinson's Euphoria, but they've also produced a few other films and TV shows in recent years, including Eugene Kotlyarenko's excellent thriller Spree. Looks like this is positioned to be their big move into prestige film.

[therewillbeblus]

While watching David O. Russell's latest eclectic discharge of moods, ideas, and Old Hollywood formulas, I intermittently consciously wondered why he would allow his name on this odd concoction and not Nailed! I greatly enjoyed both, but this is more tonally illiterate, with broad bizarre humor enmeshed with handheld camerawork by Lubezki that channels the same kind of spirituo-sentimental intimacy of his work with Malick. At times scenes seems to be edited together -or even shot- in a hasty rush, leaving a chunk of important tissue on the cutting room floor or in elisions the audience isn't cued in on, but then other uneven moments are designed so lucidly that their genius can't be accidental. Amsterdam is a very particular kind of film: at once a recreation of movies long past -based on entertaining stories, classic screwball shenanigans, sudden shifts in information and nonchalant introductions to new milieus found in noir, romantic melodrama, etc.- and also a reconstruction of these styles into a blend of soup, like a spritzer of paint cast on a canvas, calculated in practice but rooted in artistic impulse. Here, more than in any other work of his, Russell is stretching his brand of humanistic mania to its risky limits, daring to thin it out and slow it down with continual checkpoints that meditate on feeling without driving the narrative forward... while also never really stopping for too long to stop the propulsive spillage of his skeletal blueprint, fully committing to his vision of peculiar mordant drama with offbeat lunacy, under the thematic umbrella of respect with attention to the irreverent.

The film itself is not irreverent though, it's merely projecting its focus there, while leaning into the material and historical absurd, and its consequences on us collectively. The film gets didactic, but it's appropriately topical, and formulates a (very) different kind of strategy to challenge the 1% than Triangle of Sadness did, though still quite effective. Russell has a lot to say about the power of community vs individualism, and the impermanence of connection whilst retaining hope that we can evade perceived fatalisms of disconnection on a micro-scale. There's also a more deliberate exploration of Russell's interest in ethnicity and morality that is the logical pendulum-swing from American Hustle's subtler engagement with the ideas, particularly in his use of an eccentric protagonist in Bale again, refusing to be pigeonholed into an easy class. It's so much fun to watch him get inside a role like this, and it's a performance both wild and surprisingly grounded. The biggest shock here is that the standout player (among a rich cast of delicious bit parts) is Nivola, who steals all his scenes as a finely-drawn cognitively-inept detective, delivering the broadest kind of anti-humor. Russell and Nivola avoid easy routes to inject his character with overcooked cartoonishness, never boiling over the top, and reminding us all that Russell is one of the greatest working directors of comedy, who underutilizes this skill in order to have his cake and eat it too in nearly every picture he makes in order to make room for (all?) other notes on the keyboard.

I'm not sure if this is a 'good' movie, but I do think it's playing in sandboxes of long past and that deters viewers from its wavelength. Its effectiveness at forging the old and new is debatable, as is any film that is this cluttered and strangely pitching chaos at a simmer. The way that sentiment is woven into screwball tones under a noir/melodrama structure is weird, and yet the key to the film is how, thematically and formally, it reflects the mess of life, history, emotion. This feels intentionally self-reflexive, like the sloppy, jagged, perverse art that Robbie makes with heart and that Bale defends, or the nonsense songs that make the central trio feel earnestly good and in harmony with each other and the world. The songs might be stupid, but Russell makes clear that their love and compassion are not; just as America's tainted history does not negate its dignity worth nurturing. There's plenty of cynical stuff here, but Amsterdam could not be less nihilistic in spirit.

[knives]

To answer your seemingly rhetorical question, Nailed was finished without his involvement with several scenes not finished and the editing not supervised by him. The quality of the end product isn’t what the credit is about.

[therewillbeblus]

I'm aware of all of that, but from what I've gathered, the issues he and others have raised about Nailed! feel amplified here- at times it feels like a mess of editing, even within what Russell's self-consciously doing. Either way, I'm looking forward to how others react to this screwball noir set to a melodramatic post-The New World Malick rhythm

[Brian C]

I think I saw a lot of the same things here as twbb; this movie never really finds its rhythm. It has the setup and the characters and narrative of an old-fashioned screwball comedy, and Robbie's character in particular seems like it's meant to be a recreation of a Howard Hawks heroine ... even if, in the end, Russell never quite manages to find a whole lot for her to actually do (though it's easy to miss this, because she's as lovingly photographed as any classical Hollywood actress ever was). But the film never quite manages to tap into that kind of energy. It just kinda lurches about, from one line of dialogue and one scene and one plot development to the next. I don't know if the editing is the problem, or if Russell is trying so hard to fit it into a box that it never manages to be its own thing. Also, it's not actually all that funny, even if it's not pitched on a very weighty level - I'd say that it sustains low-level amusement, just enough to avoid ever becoming tedious, but also very rarely rising to the level of actually being funny.

Still, I loved the spirit of it anyway. On the one hand, its politics are fundamentally pretty banal (fascism is bad!), but they're carefully thought out, and I rather liked the way that Russell weaves that simple observation into the narrative and the film's portrayal of interracial friendship and class divides. And despite all the film's clunkiness, it's ultimately quite stirring, which is even more of an achievement given that the denouement is as jumbled as the rest of the film.

So it's right on the line between "noble failure" and "messy triumph" for me. But I'm glad I saw it, for what that's worth.

[DarkImbecile]

Unfortunately, I can't even be as generous as Brian or twbb have been toward Russell's latest: I'm about as primed as possible to be receptive to a film depicting the American upper classes as barely closeted fascist sympathizers who despise multi-cultural democracy, but I thought this was a misguided and undercooked mess, with only a handful of redemptive qualities keeping it from being a total dumpster fire. First among those worthwhile elements is Margot Robbie, who as Brian notes makes about as luminous an impression as possible despite her character being an underwritten manic bohemian dream girl.

I suspect the film would have been substantially better had a) Robbie's Valerie been the primary protagonist, b) her physical and psychological entrapment in her upper class family been more thoroughly explored, and c) her reunion with John David Washington's Harold been foregrounded while Bale's doctor character had been reduced to a supporting role. Bale does his damnedest, but Russell stuffs ten pounds of backstory, complicated relationships, and quirks into a five pound bag of a character, and it becomes a major obstacle to engaging with the film that Bale's concerns are far less compelling than those of just about any other character. Among the other main performers in the ensemble, Washington, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Rami Malek are all fine, but the rest of the supporting cast is a very mixed bag: Russell's tonal incoherence does very good actors like Michael Shannon and Timothy Olyphant no favors while leaving less polished performers like Taylor Swift and Chris Rock totally stranded.

For a movie that apparently is losing many tens of millions of dollars and spent at least some of that budget on Emmanuel Lubezki, the film also has a cheap, flat look that feels overly stagey and confined: almost everything after the opening 20 minutes is shot as interiors, actively running from the problem of convincingly portraying 1930s New York.

Finally, and separate from all of the problems I have with the filmmaking, I have to take issue with a particular distortion of the historical facts being used here — and I'm not interested in nitpicking the the many liberties taken with the actual plot by American businessmen in the 1930s to overthrow FDR, which was somewhat similar in a few details but far less dramatic and wacky in its exposure. Rather, my problem is that the broad fascist conspiracy that Russell's characters stumble onto is repeatedly signaled as one that Americans are adopting from abroad, entranced by the ideas of Hitler and Mussolini and itching to bring mechanisms of enforcing racial purity to American soil... when in fact if anything the influence went in the other direction! The American sterilization campaigns targeted at minorities and the poor that Russell implies are the work of shadowy Nazi-inspired groups entirely predate the rise of fascism and even WWI, one of many fully American concepts in the enforcement of racial superiority that inspired Hitler and other European fascists. Given that one of the core conflicts in the film is the rightfully assumed impossibility of Washington and Robbie having an open relationship in this country, it seems odd to make a movie about fascism in America and — as Russell does with a group of brownshirts who show up near the climax — dress them up in foreign clothes.

[Brian C]

For a movie that apparently is losing many tens of millions of dollars and spent at least some of that budget on Emmanuel Lubezki, the film also has a cheap, flat look

I suppose this is neither here nor there, and also probably an old-man-yelling-at-clouds comment on my part, but I feel like the vast majority of studio-ish movies made in the last 10-15 years has a "cheap, flat look". I've always attributed this to the overuse of CGI, which - even in movies like this one without a ton of special effects - is often used to "fix" backgrounds, skies, lighting, etc. Basically nothing feels like it was shot on real sets in real light with real actors anymore, it all feels manipulated and ... well, cheap and flat. It's seriously affected my enjoyment of newer movies.

[DarkImbecile]

I don’t disagree, but I thought this was noticeably poor even by those standards; even a lot of the simple interiors looked poorly lit and shabbily put together

[therewillbeblus]

A lot of it looked exactly like Lubezki's work with Malick, only in uglier spaces and without the right lighting and other superficial supports to make his style look pretty. Maybe that's what you're saying though

[Never Cursed]

For a movie that apparently is losing many tens of millions of dollars and spent at least some of that budget on Emmanuel Lubezki, the film also has a cheap, flat look

I suppose this is neither here nor there, and also probably an old-man-yelling-at-clouds comment on my part, but I feel like the vast majority of studio-ish movies made in the last 10-15 years has a "cheap, flat look". I've always attributed this to the overuse of CGI, which - even in movies like this one without a ton of special effects - is often used to "fix" backgrounds, skies, lighting, etc. Basically nothing feels like it was shot on real sets in real light with real actors anymore, it all feels manipulated and ... well, cheap and flat. It's seriously affected my enjoyment of newer movies.

Hmm, I always assumed that was a combination of an overreliance on digital photography/using fancy digital cameras without tweaking the default settings for the ultimate look of the movie and the increasingly lax standards of many color grades. I've seen too many industry people talk about this online and blame this phenomenon on different causes, but Rian Johnson's go-to DP Steve Yedlin occasionally says some interesting things about this on Twitter, both in terms of how subtle good VFX can be and in terms of the power (and potential for misuse or sloppy use) of digital cameras and post-processing suites

[DarkImbecile]

A lot of it looked exactly like Lubezki's work with Malick, only in uglier spaces and without the right lighting and other superficial supports to make his style look pretty.

Well, in a visual medium I don’t know if I’d call basic craftsmanship and attention to technical detail superficial; carefully composing your images and infusing them with meaning is obviously the most important thing, but even if you’re doing that well (and I’d argue Russell isn’t for the vast majority of this film), those aims can be undercut when the absence of those supports actively distracts the audience from them.

[knives]

I absolutely loved this keeping Russell with a perfect at bat for me. A lot of emphasis has been placed on the screwball nature of the film, but I think the von Stroheim influence is kind of a key. Russell has been becoming more and more an Altman style director allowing the margins to take over and it continues here with kind of a fetishism for expansion that reminded me so of von Stroheim. It’s a more narrative sort of expansion aiming almost at this fictional biopic quality. I felt like I knew all of New York society from the film. There’s this false lightness to it all which for me revels in an optimistic utopia that even the characters only imagine.