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The Hustle

I love a good con artist film. It’s a different animal from a heist film, where the thrill is in the elaborate planning and then the reveal of how the plan worked out, or more often, didn’t work out. In a con film, the fun comes from the fact that the con artists and the audience are in on the secret, and everybody else is in the dark. In The Sting, we become invested in Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s massive parimutuel betting con. That’s when it’s played for fun. In The Grifters, Stephen Frears explored the dark side of the con. Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, and Annette Bening take turns trying to rip off the world and each other, but they’re revealed to be not charming knaves, but the kind of abusive, amoral sociopaths who would actually con a person out of their last dollar.

Somewhere in between those two extremes is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Directed by Frank Oz, the 1988 film starred comedic superman Steve Martin and prestige actor with underutilized comic chops Michael Caine. Both are con men, but with dramatically different styles. Caine is a European sophisticate who knows where the rich, gullible widows are because he’s from the milieu. Martin is something of a confidence idiot savant, disorienting his targets with a barrage of bullshit. The younger grifter wants to learn from the older grifter, but they end up at odds — neither one of them is exactly trustworthy, you see. There ain’t room enough in the French Riviera for the two of them, so they make a bet: The first one to con a rich heiress out of $50,000 wins, and the loser must leave town.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels isn’t the greatest comedy of the ’80s, but it definitely has its moments, and a couple of decades as basic cable fare has earned it an audience. It’s ripe for a remake, and as you know, 21st-century Hollywood abhors a remake vacuum. Or something.

Anne Hathaway and Rebel WIlson

The driving force of The Hustle is Rebel Wilson, Australian comedian who produced the film and stars in the Steve Martin role. Wilson’s Penny Rust is a professional catfisher who reels in her rich, conceited, yet dopy marks on Tinder. She falls victim to the con artist’s biggest occupational hazard: when you’ve been too successful and you’ve got to leave town ahead of your vengeful victims.

Inspired by a travel magazine, she sets off to France, where, by chance, she meets Josephine Chesterfield, played by Anne Hathaway. Josephine has refined conning old men out of their excess capital into a science. She does her research, surveils her targets, and then hits them in their most psychologically vulnerable spots. From the moment she sees Penny on a train talking a guy out of a free dinner, she recognizes the game. Fearing an oversaturated con market in the hoity toity French Riviera town she prowls, Josephine tries to misdirect Penny. But the ugly American keeps coming back, and the two prideful con artists are off, trying to one-up each other for money, jewels, and bragging rights.

Like Martin and Caine, Hathaway and Wilson have the chemistry to pull this off. Josephine, who at one point gives a speech about how the best way for a woman to con a man is to let him underestimate her, repeatedly underestimates Penny’s cunning. The mark the two artists compete to fleece out of an inflation-adjusted $500,000 is Thomas Westerburg (Alex Sharp), a newly minted tech billionaire who needs to be relieved of the burden of so much IPO cash. In true con movie fashion, he turns out to be more than meets the eye.

British comedy actor Chris Addison makes his directorial debut with The Hustle, and he may be the problem with the film. Hathaway has too much fun flipping through her portfolio of accents and wardrobe of slinky dresses, while Wilson is having a blast doing physical comedy. Like in its inspiration, there are a high points where it all works, such as when Hathaway takes the personae of a severe German psychologist to cure Wilson’s faked hysterical blindness. It’s well edited, and there are no obvious, throw it against the wall improv passages, which have marred recent comedies like the Ghostbusters remake.

And yet, The Hustle never really gels to become more than a sum of its parts. Martin and Caine seemed to genuinely dislike each other, which gave Dirty Rotten Scoundrels an air of transgressive danger. Wilson and Hathaway seem like friends playing out a silly bet. They’re too comfortable, and too safe. I didn’t hate this movie, but the laughs never reached critical mass for me, either. Like What Men Want, it’s a gender flipped comedy remake that ultimately fails to rise to the quality of the onscreen talent.

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Film Features Film/TV

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie

I’ve been thinking about the concept of “guilty pleasures.” I’ve got some: ZZ Top, The Purge movies, Conan the Barbarian, “Weird Al” Yankovich, and Mario Kart, to name a few. And yet, what does “guilty pleasure” really mean? That there are some things we like that we have to feel bad about, because the object of our affection is clearly stupid, or unworthy of our cultural status, or just self-evidently bad. Now, I can justify my love for just about anything: ZZ Top is the quintessential bar band who were in the right place at the right time with the right music videos; director John Milius’ casting of language-challenged Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan was so inspired it eventually won the actor the governorship of California; “Weird Al” is a lyrical genius. But I still have the notion that I should feel bad about the fact that I want to zap annoying motorists with a turtle shell when I get behind the wheel IRL. Maybe life is too short to worry about what you’re supposed to like, and so you should just like the stuff you like—unless you like Michael Bay movies, in which case you should be ashamed of yourself.

The British TV series Absolutely Fabulous definitely falls in my “guilty pleasures” category. The tipsy adventures of PR guru Edina Monsoon and magazine editor Patsy Stone, played by Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley, gained a sizable American audience when Comedy Central imported the show in the mid-1990s. Like the best British comedy, it was simultaneously brainy and raunchy, pushing boundaries of good taste and decorum while skewering every facet of British life. But the first butt of Saunders and Lumley’s jokes were always themselves. Eddie and Patsy are entitled monsters from the English id. Like their American counterparts in ’90s cringe comedy, Seinfeld, they never miss the opportunity to make the worst decision possible in every social situation. Saunders, who did the lion’s share of the writing alongside her sketch comedy partner Dawn French, took devilish pleasure wallowing in the shallow end of fashion and celebrity. Lumley drew on her experiences as a former model and Bond girl to imbue Patsy with just the right amount of contemptuous consumption of drugs and men. Making Eddie’s daughter Saffron (Julia Sawalha) the only reasonable and responsible person on the show was a little bit of genius, because it allowed the eternally indecisive Eddie to vacillate between her daughter and best friend and push the limits of what audiences would consider a sympathetic character. Eddie’s always trying to do better, but Patsy pulls her back into the Champagne vortex.

Joanna Lumley (left) and Jennifer Saunders are still guilty of being Absolutely Fabulous.

The film adaptation seems to come too late. The show’s officially been off the air for the better part of a decade, appearing only for occasional Very Special Episodes, including one centered around the 2012 London Olympics. Amazingly, Saunders, Lumley, and the crew pick up right where they left off. Eddie and Patsy are still living the high life, even though they’re both blatantly broke. Eddie thinks she’s got a big ticket book deal brewing, but when her assistant Bubble (Jane Horrocks) transcribes her manuscript as “blah blah blah,” it’s back to the drawing board.

Meanwhile, at a disastrous fashion show, Patsy learns that supermodel Kate Moss is looking for a new PR person, so she and Eddie plot to to beat rival relations rep Claudia Bing (Celia Imrie) to the punch by using her granddaughter Lola (Indeyarna Donaldson-Holness) as a lure at a glitzy party. Predictably, the plan is a fiasco that ends with Moss falling into the Thames and Eddie and Patsy fleeing a murder rap to Cannes, France.

Saunders’ dialogue is as dense and witty as ever, and she gets much mileage out of the now-60-year-old Eddie’s oblivious out-of-touchness. Patsy’s late-game subplot riffing on Some Like It Hot is particularly fun and keeps the momentum from getting too bogged down by the endless parade of celebrity cameos, including Moss, Jon Hamm, Gwendoline Christie, and Rebel Wilson as a mouthy flight attendant who would be a good candidate for a recurring role if the show were to go on. The movie suffers from mandatory fan service moments requiring the insertion of every minor character who ever appeared on the show, and the predictable pitfalls of expanding a half-hour comedy to feature length, but Saunders and BBC director Mandie Fletcher navigate those obstacles better than Sex and the City or The X-Files films. If you’re considering coming in cold, you’re probably better off binging on the ’90s heyday of the show instead, but if AbFab‘s already on your list of not-so-guilty pleasures, you’ll find a lot to like.

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Film Features Film/TV

How To Be Single

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Four girls, all single, struggle to find love in Brooklyn. But maybe their friendship is all they really needed.

How To Be Single is an attempt to recreate the Girls equation, only with women characters whom focus groups deem likable. We first meet Alice (Dakota Johnson) in voiceover, recalling the time her freshman year she met cute with her college boyfriend Josh (Nicholas Braun), locking herself out of her dorm room when, oops, her towel got caught in the door, and uh-oh, she’s naked! And so is he! In front of all these people! But by graduation, it’s time to take a little hiatus, just so she can be sure he’s the right guy to spend the rest of her life with. Besides, she’s going to be living in Brooklyn with her rich OBGYN sister Meg (Leslie Mann), working as a paralegal, so who knows what could happen?

How To Be Single

The first thing that happens is she meets Robin (Rebel Wilson), her legal firm coworker who shows her the places in the office where the security cameras can’t see. Robin is on a quest to “bang her way through Brooklyn,” and drags Alice along with her. When Alice decides she’s sown enough wild oats, she discovers that she has blown it with Josh and must navigate life on her own. Meanwhile, Lucy (Alison Brie) is using a more exact approach. She’s got a database. To get a strong enough wi-fi signal on her brand new MacBook Pro (TM), she’s got to sit at the bar manned by Tom (Anders Holm), a guy Robin describes as a “palate cleanser, a sexual sorbet.” Copious drinking and sexual hijinx ensue, that eventually snare David (Damon Wayans Jr.), a successful professional something-or-other raising a cute young daughter on his own.

How To Be Single is a TV series trapped in a movie’s body: Specifically, it’s Sex and the City, only with computers, because we hear that’s how the kids are hooking up these days. It’s based on a book by He’s Just Not That Into You author Liz Tuccillo, who, surprise, got her start as a writer on Sex and the City. The shapeless plot seems to be composed from a handful of rejected storylines from the seminal, fin de siècle HBO series. For example, the film’s only title card cuts out the middle of Alice and David’s relationship with a simple THREE MONTHS LATER, skipping all that pesky character building that on TV would have been a half-season arc.

How To Be Single isn’t all bad. Christian Rein’s cinematography is above average, and Christian Ditter has some nice directorial flourishes, such as the Diary of a Teenage Girl-inspired onscreen graphics and a fluidly staged apartment-decorating scene. Johnson manages to rise above the material, seemingly eager to portray a human being after her star-making turn as a fantasy projection device in Fifty Shades of Grey. Wilson also manages to hold her dignity, scoring with the requisite, Judd Apatow-inspired, unedited string of improv jokes. When Johnson plays straight woman to Wilson, it’s apparent that a two-hander comedy starring those two actresses with the same director/cinematographer combo could potentially work pretty well.

But this is not that movie, and no amount of “hey, at least they seem to be trying” can excuse the phoned-in plotting and prefab, contrived wish-fulfillment that passes for a screenplay. I realize I’m not the target audience for How To Be Single, but if I were, I would feel insulted. Carrie Bradshaw, where are you when we need you?

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Pitch Perfect 2

Pitch Perfect 2 is more self-aware and self-consciously “edgy” than its not-entirely-wholesome predecessor. However, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if this hugely profitable sequel fails to engender the same levels of love and affection as the original film: the drop-off in quality is sad, and it too often replaces the joyful noises of group singing with the sickening thud of easy jokes falling flat.

Released in 2012, Pitch Perfect’s best qualities—its non-stop sass, its coy takes on college romance, and its generous female characterizations—were explicitly linked to unhip, old-fashioned notions of community, cooperation, solidarity and democracy. Whether they were squabbling or singing their hearts out, the all-girl Barden Bellas often looked and acted like a good group that just needed to get it together. Their all-for-one spirit was most visible in Pitch Perfect’s two defining musical numbers: a “riff-off” in a drained swimming pool that revives “No Diggity” as a modern American spiritual, and a final number that—and believe me, I wish this wasn’t true—brings tears of joy to my eyes every time I watch it.

Pitch Perfect bounces along like a great Lily Allen album; Pitch Perfect 2 stumbles along like a thrown-together collection of demos, outtakes and solo experiments from any pop star who wants to be taken seriously. This is a careless, placid, steer-like entertainment which bides its time and chews its cud as it awaits the online butchering that will give the masses shorter, tidier, easily consumable clips. Anna Kendrick will endure no matter what, though: she’s a sotto voce wiseacre who overcompensates for her tiny, sticklike stature—she’s always looking up at someone—by spitting lines at His Girl Friday speed until either she or whoever she’s talking to runs out of gas. But Rebel Wilson, a.k.a. Fat Amy, doesn’t escape as cleanly. Her natural deadpan and comic timing hint at vast reservoirs of mischief that lend her both grace and a certain wry dignity, but she constantly undercuts these traits every time she falls down or runs into something. (Which may be the joke, but it’s a dumb one.) Still, her Pat Benatar number is probably the musical highlight of the movie.

The rest of the wreckage—which includes David Cross, Clay Matthews, Keegan-Michael Key, the rest of the supporting cast, and a Snoop Dogg Christmas mash-up—is too dreary to contemplate. This disappointing musical reinforces an old, deeply-held conviction: whenever performers sing just to hear the sound of their own voice, they’re really obnoxious.

Grade: C