hustlers

A couple weeks ago at Ruthie’s Boutique in Provincetown, I bought a used CD of the Jennifer Lopez 2011 album Love? The cashier held it up, studying the cover and said to me coyly, “Now look at her! She just turned 50. May we all aspire to be that.”

Weeks later in a packed theater in Jersey City, on a humid, misty night, you could sense electric crackling when Jennifer Lopez takes to the pole, cash flying about, to the tumbling (and apt) Fiona Apple song “Criminal.” In the same way Brad Pitt’s over-the-hill, how-is-he-still-shaggily-stunning? handsomeness is utilized in Quentin’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in Hustlers--the deliriously entertaining film by Lorne Scafaria--Jennifer’s magnetic appeal and statuesque beauty adds to its allure. Lopez plays Ramona, a ringleader of sorts, who, along with a few other women under her wing, drugs and embezzles money from rich Wall Street types through the strip club she works for. Because of how elegantly Lopez creates such a compelling, yet compassionate (“climb into my fur” she says, sprawled out in chinchilla and studded heels) figure—its easy to see how club newcomer "Destiny" (played beautifully by Constance Wu) would be so enamored.

Based upon a lauded New York Magazine article by Jessica Pressler, Hustlers strives for on-the-nose social relevance: business going bust after the stock crash of ‘08 is the main impetus of Ramona’s enterprise of schemes du rich dude doofuses. The movie, with its brazen, of-the-moment ensemble (a very fun Cardi B and flute-tootin' Lizzo feature in bit parts), flashy, brand-heavy costuming (by Mitchell Travers), and the slick soundtrack of twinkling Chopin piano pieces interspersed with late- 2000s into early-2010s shiny house ephemera tunes (for me, Britney’s “Gimme More” has always conjured the bubble-about-to-burst American economy, hearing the song thumping at a midnight sale of her album Blackout in the now-shuttered Virgin Megastore of Union Square). Hustlers is Scorsese-light in that it never gets too sprawling nor too grim, but Scafaria shows chops as a gifted, polished storyteller. This is a movie that glaringly embraces its capitalistic glow, deviously celebrates its hollowness and leaves us with a smarmy strip club announcer to call us out as the lights go up again and we go out aspiring to be whoever we want to be. ***1/2

something keeps calling

Video for Raphael Saadiq's "Something Keeps Calling."

Saadiq's excellent new album Jimmy Lee just dropped.

art by ernst ludwig kirchner

via Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

tom's disco diner

Appreciating this disco spin on Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner" by Jerry Ropero.

oprah

I am so into Rapsody's new album Eve. It's a stunning work by a fresh female rapper!

Check video for "Oprah" below.

groovejet remixed

JSquared majors up dance classic from Spiller.

i used to be normal

"What's a life without a big major chorus?" This is a key, hard-to-argue-with philosophy dropped by one of the subjects from the lovely, buoyant little doc, I Used to Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story. Directed with heart and empathy by Jessica Leski, the film looks into the lives of four different women from four different areas around the globe, who experienced rhapsodic obsessions with particular boy bands from their teenage eras and still harbor enduring attachments. The main objects of affection here are The Beatles, Take That, the Backstreet Boys, and One Direction--an interesting mix indeed. The Beatles first ushered in a consumerist pop mania as a goofily-attractive foursome creating and performing indelible ditties that would later morph into more experimental, yet still endearingly catchy pieces of art rock as the 1960s wore on. Take That and the Backstreet Boys experienced success at the peak of music video television and physical media. One Direction in the time of new forms of social media and YouTube (the title comes from a viral video of one of the girls--howling out the way her life was before she became obsessed). Even though the particular genius of The Beatles' rock songwriting has yet to be duplicated, footage of ecstatic, screaming legions of fans has. There's a mix of joy in this, the ability to release and scream in a super-dome, but also some sadness: girls longingly caressing the bangs of One Direction; a Backstreet Boys cruise where fans can day-drink and interact, to a rabid degree, with their idols.

While it could be easy to make fun of these subjects and their fanatically wallpapered rooms of clippings (most, in adulthood, displaying their memorabilia in more toned-down, tasteful and aesthetically-pleasing ways), Leski keeps the focus upon the lives of these women, and how their dreams were sometimes kept at bay either by misfortune or by parents and societal biases that still persist.

There is something both ebullient and melancholic in the way these women thought their idols were speaking and singing directly to them, that these women sometimes shaped their lives in order to get closer to their boy bands. All of them sooner or later grow wiser, understanding the impossibility of their desires, but embracing the joy the imagery and music gives to them. I appreciate how thoughtful the director and doc are in their rapport. The photos and Maira Kalman-esque illustrations by Rebecca Clarke, animated by Leath Mattner, add a whimsical touch. ***

-Jeffery Berg