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| The Guardian - Culture: Film | | | | Amsterdam review – turn of the screwball in David O Russell's starry muddle | | by Peter Bradshaw Sep 28, 2022 | | Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington bring laughs to a exhaustingly wacky riff on a real-life fascist conspiracy in 1930s New York There’s usually a no more heart-sinking way of starting a movie than with the larky, slippery announcement: “Based on a true story – mostly!” or “What follows is all accurate – kinda!” It usually means the film will fall between the two stools marked “creatively interesting” and “factually informative”. However, David O Russell begins his elaborate screwball mystery Amsterdam by declaring: “A lot of this actually happened.” He means the film is a wacky riff on the little-known 1933 “White House putsch” in which a cabal of wealthy American businessmen conspired to overthrow President Franklin D Roosevelt, hoping to dupe a retired major general called Smedley Butler into leading their fascist veterans’ organisation. (Maybe the nearest British equivalent was Lord Mountbatten being approached in 1968 by a group of establishment grandees to unseat Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.) Amsterdam imagines three innocent veterans being drawn into these creepy shenanigans. Christian Bale plays Burt Berendsen, a disabled ex-soldier who lost an eye in the first world war; after The Big Short, this is Bale’s second “glass eye” role. Burt is a doctor in New York, supplying pain medication and prosthetic limbs to fellow veterans on a pro bono basis. Burt’s army pal Harold Woodman (John David Washington) is now a qualified lawyer, and helping him to run a morale-boosting ex-servicemen’s gala dinner. And the two men’s soulmate is the mercurial and brilliant Valerie Voze, played by Margot Robbie, who in the first world war was a volunteer nurse and dadaist artist who saved all the shrapnel she dug out of soldiers’ shattered bodies to create bizarre objet trouvé artworks. Continue reading... | | | | | Tom Hanks thinks he's only made four 'pretty good' movies. Which are they? | | by Stuart Heritage Sep 28, 2022 | | The actor said he sees only four of his films as better than the rest, requiring a deep dive into those he might be talking about Tom Hanks has written a novel. The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, the full-length follow-up to 2017’s short story collection Uncommon Type, will be published next May. The novel apparently spans 80 years, and concerns a comic book that is eventually adapted into a movie. To accompany the announcement, Hanks released a brief statement, and it is quite profoundly Hanksy. Not only does Hanks use the statement as proof that he knows his literary beans – at one point he literally quotes Hamlet – but he also pulls off the mother of all aw-shucks America’s Dad moves. “I’ve made a ton of movies (and four of them are pretty good, I think),” he writes, in what is almost definitely a demonstration of his famed everyman understatement. Unfortunately, however, it also shows that Tom Hanks isn’t very good at the internet. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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