american hustle

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1800241

i love confidence movies.  i have a lot of fun guessing who is getting conned at any particular time.  i like to imagine what i would do if i was the confidence person.  of course, i would be a terrible confidence person.  can i lie?  no.  can i devise a complicated swindle?  surely not.  am i tall?  the jury is in, and they say "not guilty."

american hustle suffered from a failure to decide whether it was a documentary or a confidence movie.  i mean, it was a confidence movie, but it was also sort of based on some real event or something, which really cut it off at the knees.  confidence movies are fun when the twist goes *bigger* than you expected.  american hustle's twist was pretty lame.  really?  they only wanted to con the feds?  and they got no money out of it?  booooooring.  but that is what happens when you constrain yourself to so-called reality.

american hustle gets two perms.