We need to talk about [American] hustle

First, I should start with a shamener (it’s an opener but when I shame myself for skipping this regular writing exercise last week). This is a reminder to myself that I, Katya, slacked last week. I justified it as “not in the mood” at first, then came the usual “no inspiration” and last nail in the coffin was “I’m not obsessed with anything this week”, all of which were either a lame excuse or simply untrue.

I always need to get something off my chest. This week in “3 things I can’t stop thinking about” obsessions is all about my love for David O. Russell’s American Hustle.

#1 It’s the perfect movie [for me]

I watch American Hustle at least once a year for a few reasons. First one we’ll skip because it’s a dead end for any conversation (“I fucking loved it and no one can change my opinion”).

#2 It’s a feast of life

Joie de vivre that this movie washes you with almost instantly is the second and a more substantial reason. I can’t put my finger on one specific thing that does it for me. American Hustle is like a great expensive niche perfume — it has many equally exciting layers and leaves you in a long-lasting cloud of happiness. The music, the acting, the costumes — to me, they are perfect.

Maybe I would have been better off in the New York of that era, but we’ll never know. What we do know is that I would like to own all of Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence’s outfits, thank you very much.

Someone on Pinterest was very nice to put this together

#3 It brings the real hustle back

This one is both a good reason to watch it and the reason this movie resurfaced in my obsessive mind last week. American Hustle reminds me what hustle actually means during the times when it got a little twisted if not perverted by the culture. It’s not the 5 to 9, it’s the other thing which I call a creative art of determination to make something out of nothing, out of every circumstance. Or, in the words of Christian Bale’s character, “The art of survival, is a story that never ends.”

I come from the city where this specific definition of hustle was born (do not argue with Odessans over this, not only you won’t win but you’ll be lightly beaten with a dusty Isaac Babel hardcover) and this movie puts the spirit of survival on a beautiful pedestal. I grew up with some weird magical knowledge that being from Odessa gives you a certain super power elsewhere, kind of a secret society you belong to and I felt the familiarity in my bones watching American Hustle. It took some growing up and history lessons to realize that survival for those hustlers I heard so much about was painfully real and not just a fun way to pass time, but I’ll dig into the history of Jews in Ukraine some other time. Which is why it came as no surprise for me that Mel Weinberg, the real person who is so wonderfully portrayed by Christian Bale, traces his roots back to Eastern Europe of those glorious hustler times. The whole story is somewhat crazy and partly real, but it almost doesn’t matter.

Here’s to joie de vivre and more good movies that make us all feel something.

Bonus listening is another obsession of mine. It’s no surprise that this movie looks this good — its Director of Photography Linus Sandgren has a beautiful eye and gave us many more visually stunning movies since then. I hope that we can see his latest works No Time To Die and Don’t Look Up on a screen size they deserve later this year. In the meantime, listen to how he approaches creating cinematic worlds in conversation with Roger and James Deakins here.

An opportunity to point fingers at a bad brief presents itself unexpectedly

2020 was a complete disaster for avid movie goers like me. However, I had the privilege of watching one of the major cinematic events of 2020 - Christopher Nolan's Tenet - at its scheduled IMAX theater premiere in September. After waiting for 2 weeks+ post premiere, my sister and I bought earliest tickets on the weekday and made it to the theater equipped with masks and big cups of strong coffee to process a potentially mind-bending movie. We were right to bring coffee, but it didn't help.

Sometime mid-movie our brains refused attempts to track everything that was going on. We compensated for that lack of brain activity in the theater with dissecting Tenet whichever way possible with whoever possible in the days that followed.

~ spoilers for Tenet and random Nolan movies ahead ~

~ spoilers for Tenet and random Nolan movies ahead ~

~ spoilers for Tenet and random Nolan movies ahead ~

Needless to say, this is not a movie review. This is a love story (dramatic look at the camera).

I love what I do for a living with (some say) unhealthy intensity because of the way advertising and strategy overlap with other things I love. Discussing Tenet gave me a ton of pleasure and great conversations with friends, but it also surprised me with being quite a metaphor for creative strategy.

If you saw Inception, you likely remember how DiCaprio's character Cobb explains the movie in a nutshell: idea is the most contagious thing in the world.

In this scene Cobb is giving Saito the insight and we, the audience, now also know this major key to everything that happens in the movie. Infecting others with an idea is the key to getting Cobb’s life back, getting Ariadne's character to join the team, etc.

The mechanic of how they do it - by dreams within dreams within dreams etc etc - is secondary and wouldn't be as appealing if we didn’t know what was driving characters through it. Inception is not a simple movie to understand, but having a centering point of clarity sure helped process the multi-layered storytelling around it.

Unlike its predecessor Inception, Tenet is missing that insight - the crucial piece of information that gives meaning to everything onscreen. There's nothing in the movie that clearly and concisely explains what the central idea is, making it hard to follow and unsure where we landed in the end. Just like a bad brief, Tenet confuses much more than impresses with putting a mechanic at its center instead of a sticky, inspiring idea.

I'm sure some will disagree with me on the strategy part and these disagreements will likely overlap with the arguments of those who disagreed with me on Tenet. That's okay, for me this is an end of a beautiful friendship. It could be just the beginning for some of you if you tweet thoughts on the above @ me.

How to self-destruct in style without taking the environment down with you

Bring your own glass, dammit.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but our newly adopted social drinking habits are generating too much plastic trash for absolutely no reason.

Walk around any neighborhood in New York and you’ll see the byproduct of restaurant industry’s lifeboat — drinks to go — everywhere. Single use plastic cups, lids and straws overflow trash cans around the city, congregate in the darker corners of the streets and around park benches, signaling that the idea of “don’t shit where you eat” hasn’t fully taken hold with our society just yet.

Realistically, we’re a dozen huge plastic garbage ocean islands away from glass drinkware everywhere times, so I decided to put a list of a few better, well-designed options.

For me, there’s zero aesthetic pleasure in drinking alcohol from a plastic cup. You don’t have to agree with that completely, but paying $10+ for cocktails or wine and drinking it from plastic cups kind of cheapens the experience. If you’re into it, fine. The problem is that majority of people don’t seem to recycle plastic cups they drink from, adding plastic nightmare to the global disaster we’re living through right now. If you’re paying so much for a to go experience you might as well do it in style and don’t destroy the environment.

To put it in words some will understand and get motivated by: if wonderful Jason Polan was still with us sketching New Yorkers from all over the place, you’d want to be immortalized holding something more thoughtful than a clear plastic cup.

~ also ~ 4th of July sale almost everywhere ~ do it now ~ grab while you can ~ shop small and shop local ~ I’ve looked through A LOT of options ~ it took me 2 months of testing to pick a lunch box and it was perfect ~ don’t hide your personality, let your freak flag fly on the to go cup ~ ziplock bag will prevent spillage in your bag ~ thanks for coming to my TED talk!

Let’s see what we got.

Winner right out of the gate, this Porter to go glass is p e r f e c t + currently on sale for $20. Boy it makes that expensive glass of wine or cocktail to go taste better, I’m already feeling it.

Check out the full list of beautiful to go glasses on Medium.