Neverending
CS! Platinum
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 65,791
Likes: 8,649
Location:
Last Online Nov 25, 2024 17:56:45 GMT -5
|
Post by Neverending on Sept 13, 2019 2:21:22 GMT -5
 Brace yourself. Dracula and PG Cooper are about to have their first fight. Is Hustlers a Millennial tale of the underprivileged overcoming the collapse of the stock market in 2008 — or is it a Generation Z story about Men’s Rights. I know Doomsday is hard at the prospect of a good Reverse MeToo debate, but I’m gonna side with Dracula and argue that Hustlers is perhaps the first movie about the struggles of what’s confusingly known as Elder Millennials. Can y’all stop lumping us 80’s kids with PhantomKnight and his Harry Potter loving ass? Thank you. The story begins in the holy year of 2007, a time in which money grew on tree’s and you might run into Usher at the strip club. There we meet the Tiger Mom from the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat who has the face of a 40-year-old but the body of a 12-year-old — so basically Asian. SnoBorderZero you can share that joke with Wesley Snipes. She’s horrible at stripping but is soon taken under the wing of Jennifer Lopez, who at 50-years of age looks younger than PG Cooper. She blossoms and the two of them have a prosperous life together. Then 2008 happens and everything goes to shit. To survive, they cook up a scheme in which they get clients in the Champagne Room drugged up, charge obscene amounts of money to their account and then keep a portion of it. All this happened in real life and is the basis of a 2015 article in New York Magazine. The movie closely follows the true events, but unfortunately, miscast the main role. Constance Wu doesn’t necessarily deliver a bad performance but she’s clearly too old for the part. The real-life person was a 17-year-old high school dropout who somehow got hired at Larry Flynt’s Hustlers Nightclub and became the protege of an aging stripper (a Gen-Xer) who ultimately led her to a life of crime. The movie could have played up the Gen-X/Millennial relationship, which the article does emphasize on, but instead chose to portray Jennifer Lopez as “the hustler” and Constance Wu as the wide-eyed companion caught up in her web. In truth it was the Millennial who was the brain’s of the operation and the Gen-Xer the wild card who fucked everything up. The article makes sure to point out that these two women hated each other. The movie chooses to be less catty and more “female empowerment”, which is nonsense but ultimately not a big issue cause it’s layered in a commendable post-2008 Millennial story. |
|
1godzillafan
Studio Head
Join Date: Feb 2017
I like pie!
Posts: 9,480
Likes: 6,217
Location:
Last Online Nov 8, 2024 5:42:00 GMT -5
|
Post by 1godzillafan on Oct 6, 2019 15:12:00 GMT -5
I liked it.
|
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,106 
Likes: 5,732
Location:
Member is Online
|
Post by Dracula on Nov 3, 2019 23:29:43 GMT -5
Hustlers(9/16/2019)
I’m generally used to knowing months in advance what movies are worth looking forward to but every once in a while something will come out of nowhere and surprise you, and that’s more or less what happened with Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers, which tells the true story of a group of exotic dancers who form a gang of sorts which starts drugging and robbing various customers in order to “get theirs.” In some quarters the film was being sold as a sort of economic revenge romp with women nobly fighting back against their opressors, which is not necessarily something I would have gotten behind, but the actual movie exists in a more morally nuanced place than that. In essence the film is another entry in the much imitated formula established by Goodfellas in which we sort of watch a criminal enterprise as it rises and then falls, and while this is familiar I do think this movie iterates on the format enough to avoid simply being derivative. Where it loses points is in the aesthetics. The movie’s never quite sure whether it wants to be straight-up gritty or whether it wants to go for more of a flashy style in keeping with the Scorsese films that inspired it. Some of the reviews for this thing have been a bit over the top, I think it’s been the beneficiary of lowered expectations, but it is a quality film that will connect with certain audiences very strongly.
***1/2 out of Five
|
|
Neverending
CS! Platinum
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 65,791
Likes: 8,649
Location:
Last Online Nov 25, 2024 17:56:45 GMT -5
|
Post by Neverending on Nov 3, 2019 23:42:09 GMT -5
Hustlers(9/16/2019)I’m generally used to knowing months in advance what movies are worth looking forward to but every once in a while something will come out of nowhere and surprise you, and that’s more or less what happened with Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers, which tells the true story of a group of exotic dancers who form a gang of sorts which starts drugging and robbing various customers in order to “get theirs.” In some quarters the film was being sold as a sort of economic revenge romp with women nobly fighting back against their opressors, which is not necessarily something I would have gotten behind, but the actual movie exists in a more morally nuanced place than that. In essence the film is another entry in the much imitated formula established by Goodfellas in which we sort of watch a criminal enterprise as it rises and then falls, and while this is familiar I do think this movie iterates on the format enough to avoid simply being derivative. Where it loses points is in the aesthetics. The movie’s never quite sure whether it wants to be straight-up gritty or whether it wants to go for more of a flashy style in keeping with the Scorsese films that inspired it. Some of the reviews for this thing have been a bit over the top, I think it’s been the beneficiary of lowered expectations, but it is a quality film that will connect with certain audiences very strongly. ***1/2 out of Five |
|
