American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013), scrutinizes the life of a crumbling conman trying to “survive”, and epitomizes the perfection of storytelling within film by focusing specifically on the character’s strife
and brilliantly stylizing the world in which the character exists. American Hustle is also stacked with stout actors, handling characters that require such actors to do them justice. While some people will compliment Amy Adam’s
convincing transformation from a strong conwoman to a seductive English business woman or will commend Jennifer Lawrence’s ability to tickle the nerves of her audience and convey an unpredictable bundle of fun, the true master of character in this intense drama lies in Christian Bale’s deteriorating and brilliant conman named Irving Rosenfeld, who is continuously and unfairly attacked by those he loves. Rosenfeld's own emotional pain causes him to wrestle with his deceitful occupation, producing a crumbling character bombarded with internal stress. 
 
There were many particulars that are admirable about Christian Bale’s performance, but the single characteristic that has been recurring in most of his past films, and is existent in American Hustle as well, is Bale’s constant weight gains and losses between his character portrayals. Famously, Bale lost 63 pounds in the film The Mechanist (Brad Anderson, 2004), and then gained back the weight, plus more, to become the iconic and powerful Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005). What was interesting about the character of Irving Rosenfeld that differed from Bale’s usual weight changes, was his lack of the typical muscle gain, and instead, gain of fat. Bale shows us in American Hustle that he is willing to literally become the character that a screenwriter wrote, even if that character is an overweight and unattractive slob. Christian Bale takes method acting to the full extreme, and that is what makes him one of the most versatile, intelligent and unique actors on the market.

While Bale's character produces a strong subject to maintain the audience's interest, the quality of the actual story creation provides a separate platform to push the Irving's journey. As filmmaking has progressed, screenwriters have felt the need to complicate their stories, drawing the audience’s attention to their characters using flashbacks, narrations, montages, etc. These tactics can be seen in many of Christopher Nolan's films such as Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), and Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010), taking layers of style and story and overlapping them to create a functioning and completed plot. American Hustle replicates this style. Eric Warren Singer, screenwriter, begins the story with a pivotal scene in Irving Rosenfeld’s internal deterioration, capturing our curiosities, forcing us to ponder the full story of why Christian Bale’s character is so dedicated to persuading a politician to accept a bribe. We are then launched into a flashback of a party where Irving first met Amy Adams’ character Sydney Prosser, allowing us to follow Rosenfeld's journey to the bribe we previously saw. This style of storytelling within a film is consistently successful as it sparks the audiences’ interests and provides a beginning look at the characters we will be viewing.

The brilliancy of the screenwriting and the powerful performances by esteemed actors brought the story to life, but David O. Russell used his mastery as the director to add depth and relevance to the film and its presence in the current context. Opening with the traditional titles from the seventies of both Columbia Pictures and Annapurna Pictures, the director immediately establishes a popular style of contemporary films, highlighted by the burgundy undertones and 1970's rock'n'roll. This style was seen particularly in last year's Oscar Best Picture winner Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012), where the time period was heavily developed in the setting to create Affleck's mise en scene. David O. Russell, understanding the success of Affleck's style in Argo, found another great story during a similar historical time, and focused on the same design.

Recent filmmaking was not the only influence that was evident in American Hustle; it was easy to see that David O. Russell did his homework. The most obvious influence that can be seen throughout the entire story, was Martin Scorsese's renowned classic Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) which used various character's points of view and stories through narration to create a completed, and deeply developed plot. Russell mimicked this in American Hustle and was able to successfully use this storytelling technique to his advantage. Another classic film, The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973), one that surprised audiences for it's unexpected ending, set the stage for modern and contemporary twist ending plots. David Russell finished his film in a similar fashion. Although, looking back, I guess I should have expected the unexpected when viewing a film entitled American Hustle, who's main characters specialize in trickery.

David O. Russell should be commended for executing a film that utilizes the medium of filmmaking to its full potential and draws upon current cinematic trends and past classic styles. American Hustle is overall a complete film with depth, requiring a great deal of thought and analysis. This is one that I will be seeing multiple times, and I advise you to do the same.

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES by Derek Cianfrance
Release date: March 29, 2013

I can’t decide whether I love this trailer, or if my interest in it is based more on the strangeness of it all. Ryan Gosling with facial tattoos and bleached hair… Eva Mendes as the tough, protective mother (compared to the last thing I saw her in – a fantastical, seductive vignette from Holy Motors)… Bradley Cooper as a cop in a terrible, terrible windbreaker. The single glimpse of that last one interests me more than the whole of Silver Linings Playbook. The title of the film is the literal English meaning for “Schenectady,” as in Schenectady, NY. As in the town just north of Albany and west of the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border, where nothing much really happens. The official premise is that Luke (Gosling), a motorcycle stunt rider, wants to be a part of his infant son’s life; in desperation to contribute, he begins robbing banks, which pits him against a rookie cop (Cooper) with lots to prove. I have a feeling that “an exhilarating epic of fathers, sons and consequences” is a more apt description though, getting at both the scale and emotional core briefly displayed here. Derek Cianfrance has reportedly directed one hell of a film, better than Blue Valentine, and one cinephiles will definitely love. Regardless of pedigree, this trailer does it for me. Bring on the face tattoos.

Header photo [COLLIDER]

MOOD INDIGO by Michel Gondry
Release date: April 10, 2013

Just watch. This makes me happy in all possible ways. Also, Omar Sy! 

You don't even need to understand the language to know exactly what is going on. Feel it in your heart. However... for those of you who insist... a rough translation, using my French 102 skills:

0:09 “Thank you”
April 24
0:15 “Hello.” “Hello.”
0:28 I feel like my whole life depends on this moment
0:35 And that was it?
The most poignant
Stories of love
Based on the masterpiece by Boris Vian
Director Michel Gondry
Invites you to live an unforgettable adventure.

42 by Brian Helgeland
Release date: April 12, 2013

Don't judge this trailer based on the inclusion of a song by Jay-Z (he may be everywhere because of Mr. Timberlake right now, but this trailer was cut months ago...). Besides, have you listened to the lyrics? "I father, I Brooklyn Dodger them; I jack, I rob, I sin; Aww man, I'm Jackie Robinson; 'Cept when I run base, I dodge the pen." Actually, go ahead and judge it on the song. You could write a grad school thesis on those lyrics. Harrison Ford, all gruff and dapper (he suited up, 40's style!) came out of "retirement" to play Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey, the man who is credited with breaking the so-called color barrier in baseball by signing Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman). And make no mistake -- this is Jackie Robinson's story. I'm curious to see whether the film handles the narrative as an ensemble or a biopic, though, because while it would be easy to tell only Robinson's story, the truth is that it took a small army to put him on that field (and keep him there). I expect Ford's character to steal the spotlight more than once. The trailer seems to uphold Robinson as the "face of change" in '42 baseball --  not just a man playing the game he loved but, as all pioneers do, an ideal who represented genuine cultural progress. This trailer is solid; writer/director Brian Helgeland need only avoid telling too many stories or allowing the film to buckle under the weight of its own (rightfully) important subject matter. 

If you've ever heard Ang Lee speak you know he is humble, funny, and whip smart. He often speaks of his deficiencies -- sexual repression, self-doubt, identity issues -- with rare transparency and humor, illuminating the themes of his films with intensely personal insight.  

Ang Lee is ethnically Chinese, culturally a hybrid of Taiwan and the U.S., but particularly rooted in neither place. He grew up under the heavy influences of education (his father was the principal the high school he attended) and an agriculturally-based economy, complimented by parental encouragement to read Chinese classic literature and practice calligraphy. All early signs pointed to a future in academia, but Lee found himself instead drawn to the arts. He attended what is now the National Taiwan University of Arts and, after mandatory military service for the Republic of China, completed his thesis film at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (also having served as Spike Lee's Assistant Director on Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads). These experiences enriched Lee and produced a sort of global wanderer and citizen, and reinforced his need to create films. "I don't know where I am, but I never know where I am. I was born in China, then my parents moved to Taiwan, where we were outsiders, then to the States, then back to China, then back here. I trust the elusive world created by movies more than anything else. I live on the other side of the screen."

This mentality has allowed Lee to approach filmmaking in a way that few directors can. It has been said that he creates quintessentially American stories, and he attributes that ability to seeing traditional material with fresh eyes where others might be unable to escape their culture's well-worn interpretations. "My resources come from reality, not theatrical conventions... [but] I have that problem when I do Chinese films. People say I twist genres; sometimes I feel I just untwist it, set it straight. But that's just the way I see it."

Lee's first two post-grad films were original screenplays submitted to Taiwanese competitions out of desperation. Despite early acclaim and support from the William Morris Agency as a result of his thesis film, Fine Line, Lee did not find work for six years.  "When I sent those scripts, that was the lowest point of my life. We'd just had our second son, and when I went to collect them from hospital, I went to the bank to try and get some money to buy some diapers, the screen showed I've got $26 left." Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet won top prizes and garnered Lee modest funds to begin filming. During his search for a producer, Lee was approached by the founders of Good Machine (the company that would later be merged with USA Films to create Focus Features and continues to distribute for Lee) through whom he began his longstanding and fruitful partnership with James Schamus. Schamus has written or co-written all but three of Lee's films, a collaboration for which Lee is relieved: "I don't care about writing really. When I started out, nobody gave me scripts, so I had to write. . . That's why I wrote family drama - I'm a domestic person, it's all I know! Now I'm kind of established as a director, I much prefer directing to writing. Writing's lonely. Directing, I get all kinds of inspiration."

The Wedding Banquet (perhaps unintentionally) set something of a career trajectory for Lee. Despite becoming a household name for the stir he created with Brokeback Mountain's subject matter, it was this 1993 comedy about a gay New York couple that introduced his recurring theme of sexually charged identity crises. Eat Drink Man Woman (the film that inspired the Mexican-American remake Tortilla Soup for which Lee wrote the screenplay), Sense & Sensibility, and Lust, Caution all feature characters struggling to find themselves amidst cultural repression and sexual exploration. Beyond admitting his own sexual repression, Lee find himself uniquely suited to empathize with these "lost" characters. "I do have identity problems -- what is the deepest cultural root for me? All my life I've been a foreigner." Lee was also nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for The Wedding Banquet, a trend that has persisted well into his career -- his films have won a total of eight Oscars, twelve BAFTA's, and eight Golden Globes to date. 

In the midst of critical acclaim, Lee continually challenges himself to grow as a storyteller. Having read and loved  the Crane Precious Sword Crouching Iron Pentalogy (a series of five books often abbreviated as the "Crane-Iron Pentalogy"), Lee detected a filmable story in the fourth book, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  He optioned the novel in 1998 but never felt skilled or qualified enough as a director to tackle the ambitious subject matter. He continued to work for the next few years, directing in succession Sense & Sensibility, The Ice Storm, and Ride with the Devil, films that gave him experience with larger scope and action. "Going back after three major league productions, English-language films including one somewhat action film, I thought I was ready. I was, you know, tougher." 

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (a Chinese proverb meaning "talented or dangerous people hidden from view") follows Jen, a young woman who fakes her own death and vanishes into the desert with a horse and a legendary sword, the Green Destiny. Lee embraced the mythology of the sword, interpreting it as a feminine representation. He also wanted to create a romantic drama that wasn't "just a martial arts film" while using the fight sequences to act as "expressions of relationships." The film also subverted traditional Chinese expectations: "Usually with this genre the first thing that happens is a good fight sequence to show that you're in good hands. So we broke that rule. I think a lot of that comes from the western audience." Just like Lee himself, the film is neither western nor Chinese, yet succeeds in appealing to both.

2003's Hulk was Lee's first foray into mainstream Hollywood. He devoted three exhausting years to the film, choosing to approach the story with an emphasis on the strain of Banner's father-son dynamic. Though it underperformed at the box office, it was the first film that caused his father to approve of Lee's chosen profession. "He told me to just put on my helmet and keep on going." This sanction from his father inspired Lee to pare down his style and focus. He returned to the intimate storytelling of his early films and subsequently yielded the controversial 2005 masterpiece Brokeback Mountain. 

After completing Lust, Caution, Lee spent four grueling years adapting and shooting the "unfilmable" Life of Pi. Based on Yann Martel's prizewinning novel of the same name, the story follows the lifelong spiritual journey and 227-day-at-sea ordeal of Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel.  After growing up the son of a zookeeper in French-colonized Pondicherry, India (and named after a Parisian swimming pool), Pi, his family, and the animals begin a trans-pacific journey to Canada. Their Japanese freighter is sunk during a storm and Pi is stranded at sea on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, during which time he and the tiger must learn to co-exist and survive. 

Lee was challenged by nearly every aspect of the film: technical difficulties and shooting in 3D, the scope and location of the set pieces, the psychological and internal nature of the narrative, the need for a realistic CGI tiger, and finding the right actor to play Pi -- ultimately an inexperienced, 17-year-old Indian boy named Suraj Sharma -- all took their toll. Lee became a spiritual mentor to Sharma and the entire experience was very intense for cast and crew alike. Reports USA Today, "One of the crowning moments is the sinking of the cargo ship that starts Pi's journey. All told, the storm-filled scene took nearly 77 days to shoot." Upon completion of the massive production, Lee remarked, "I started to feel this aching in my bones. I didn't feel like celebrating, but I should have. Give everyone a big hug and smile. But nothing." The film is a technical marvel, the new benchmark for 3D filmmaking. But it also contains many of Lee's tried-and-true themes (self-acceptance, actualization, global awareness) while introducing a new one: spiritual discovery.  Life of Pi is expected to garner a Best Picture nomination at the 2013 Academy Awards. 

And Lee will be on to to the next adventure: "I'm not really good at time off. I'm a fortunate filmmaker. People send me stuff. Whatever gets me hooked, makes me feel like doing a movie, I just go do it. That will be the next one or two years of my life. Or, if it's like this case, it will be my next four years."

You need to know about Nicolas Winding Refn.  

A Danish director who comes from a cinema family (his parents are a cinematographer and director/editor, respectively), he has a distinctly unique perspective on the inner workings of Hollywood.  He doesn't do things traditionally on his sets: he prefers to shoot in "emotional chronological order," hugs his actors when they're trying too hard to be original, and likes driving around L.A. at night for inspiration.  He can be credited with giving Tom Hardy his start as Charles Bronson in Bronson and was awarded Best Director at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival for Drive.  He and Ryan Gosling have the sort of working relationship that can most aptly be described as a marriage -- and they're pairing up again for next year's Only God Forgives. 

Winding Refn credits The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) as the thing that first inspired him to make films. "My parents were brought up on the French New Wave. That was god to them, but to me it was the antichrist, and how better to rebel against your parents than by watching something your mother is going to hate, which were American horror movies" (Director's Guild of America). All of his films bear a gritty realism that reflects his blunt speaking style; there is something purely European about his phrasing, that he doesn't shy away from potential offense to make a point. And yet, he is never crass -- simply truthful. The Danish film Pusher (1996, about a drug dealer who grows increasingly desperate to repay his boss when a deal goes south) was Winding Refn's debut; it began as a short film made after dropping out of film school but a producer approached him about turning it into a feature. It holds strong on Rotten Tomatoes with a respectable 81%, and its sequels were rated even higher. Pusher established Winding Refn's style as gritty, unvarnished, and heavily influenced by his dual upbringing in Copenhagen and New York. 

Bronson came to him through his U.K. distributor. It is a pseudo-biographical film about Michael Peterson, better known as Charles Bronson, England's most notorious prisoner. Winding Refn had honed his directing skills after Pusher with two sequels, Fear X and Bleeder, all especially adequate preparation for the character study given their violent and psychological themes. Together with Tom Hardy he created a theatrical, manic picture of a man who is both notorious and non-existent. "I wanted to make the film very operatic and very feminine, because it’s also very much about the concept of art and art is a feminine medium... The painting of the face is more like he’s a circus entertainer, like an old-fashioned personality that doesn’t exist anymore. And yet there is no face – he’s an invisible person, because Charlie Bronson is a made up person, he doesn’t exist" (Filmmaker).

Bronson is the identity Peterson assumed after years in prison, wanting to give himself over to the spectacle of it all -- wanting to be famous. Winding Refn has spoken about similar tendencies he struggled with as a child and young filmmaker: impatience, and wanting to have the finished product before earning it. It was partially because of this that he began shooting films in chronological order, preferring to let the film surprise and develop organically. "When you make a movie you make two movies. You make a physical movie, which is a physical journey, and you make the physical movie with the script.... But shooting it in chronological order, you add a metaphysical part, where the movie takes on a life of its own." 

Shooting in this manner gives his films a palpably authentic feeling that is so often missing in Hollywood. Drive benefitted not only from being shot 80% chronologically (since the more expensive set pieces had to be done in one go) but also from his need to "make films for himself." Gosling requested that Winding Refn direct it so the director pulled it from Universal's shelf to retool the story.  Drive as it was originally drafted starred Hugh Jackman and lacked the driver-as-stuntman component, a book-inspired addition that would prove virtually impossible to remove from Winding Refn's interpretation without degrading the story. In the way that Bronson explored femininity, Drive explored masculinity in all of its bloody, muscle car-bound stereotypes. Though based on the book by James Sallis which has a sequel, Driven, Winding Refn has no plans to direct the next chapter of The Driver's story.

Gosling and Winding Refn continue their productive partnership with Only God Forgives, now in post-production and slated for an April 2013 release in Denmark (U.S. dates are so far unavailable). The pair have also begun scripting a remake to Logan's Run that won't surface until 2014 at the earliest. If these projects reflect the sensibilities of his earlier work, Nicolas Winding Refn will soon become a household name and one of the more influential filmmakers of the 21st century. 

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Pusher III, Bronson, Valhalla Rising & Drive are all available to view on Netflix Streaming.

Check out the interview with Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling from the 2011 Cannes Film Festival below, courtesy of The Film Stage (founded by Messiah College alum Jordan Raup). Heads up for some profanity.