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but it took me a while to buy in. The opening scene of them walking down a hotel corridor in super slow-motion while Steely Dan's "Dirty Work" was blaring on the soundtrack sort of got things off on the wrong foot for me. (The song choices here, while mostly all good songs, are only a tad less on-the-nose than they were in FLIGHT, and people savaged Zemeckis for that shit.)
In all honestly, I was probably watching it with an overly critical eye in light of it winning Best Picture from NYFCC and scoring so highly on so many Top 10 lists. Anyhow, I guess it comes together well enough that it ends up being satisfying and fun and all of that, so ultimately I liked it more than I disliked it. I just wouldn't put it in my Top 10.
I thought Christian Bale was great. In an odd way he was kind of the conscience of the movie. I liked the weariness that he brought to the role. Cooper was very good too. (And he fucking nailed the Louis CK impression.) Amy Adams was exceptional as always.
Jennifer Lawrence was miscast IMO. I had a hard time buying her in the role for some reason. I'm usually a big fan of hers, but I didn't even think her performance was all that great here. I can't decide if the "Live and Let Die" scene was a giant embarrassment or just a tiny one.
I guess this was Scorsese-esque, but it doesn't even come close to having the panache of a prime-era Scorsese movie. Early Paul Thomas Anderson, especially Boogie Nights, was both a more blatant and much better rip-off of Marty stylistically.
This mostly just felt David O. Russell-esque to me. I didn't think it was all that much different from his last two aesthetically. The biggest way the Goodfellas homage comes through is probably in the dueling voice overs from multiple narrators. The classic rock soundtrack has become so cliche over the years that it doesn't really count as being a nod to Scorsese anymore. (Also, the music was mostly in the background in Scorsese movies and in a lot of cases it was source music playing out of jukeboxes or car radios or whatever, even if you didn't notice that that was the case. The way the music was used here was almost like you were watching a music video at times.)
The use of slow-motion and other stylistic flourishes were nods too, I guess, but Russell's use of them just mostly felt arbitrary to me. (As opposed to in, say, Raging Bull, where the slow-motion was used almost exclusively for De Niro's POV shots to emphasize what he was seeing and thinking. In other words, it was used to serve a purpose, not just because it looked cool.)
I actually had a much easier time buying into Silver Linings Playbook as a sort of modern-day throwback to screwball comedy than I did buying into this as a sort of a confused mixture of screwball comedy, dark comedy, period drama, meta commentary on film making, love triangle romance, political commentary, etc. It was definitely not terrible, just lightweight and under-cooked. ----
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