Because Everybody Else Has One

OK, this isn't quite as bad as you may have heard. It's certainly not good, though. This review is also up on Channel 24 What it’s about When low-level con artist, Penny, worms her way into her life, high-class hustler, Josephine, does her best to remove Penny from her life as quickly as possible before she has a chance to ruin the life she has built for herself on the French Riviera. When everything she tries fails, she challenges Penny to a wager whereby the first to swindle a young tech-billionaire out of $500,000 gets to stay in this swanky riverside paradise while the loser has to leave for less desirable climes. What we thought The Hustle is a gender-swapped remake of the ‘80s Steve Martin/ Michael Caine comedy, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which was itself based on the lesser known Marlon Brando/ David Niven vehicle, Bedtime Stories from 1964. Third time, as it turns out, is not always the charm. Despite a certain amount of snobbishness by some critics at the t...

After that murders row of horrible, horrible comedies that I've reviewed over the last couple of weeks, boy did I need this! The first Pitch Perfect was an unexpected smash and an even more unexpected comedy gem, but it wasn't necessarily one that was begging for a sequel. Of course, when the numbers add up, a franchise must be born so here we are three years later with a followup that is very nearly as good as the original. It has a couple of slight flaws, to be sure, but it's overall a real delight that easily deserves the big box office numbers it's sure to get. The story this time around does not quite have the perfectly measured simplicity of its predecessor, but it works well enough. And even if the film's half dozen or so subplots do often threaten to overwhelm its primary plot, they still work perfectly well on their own terms. As such, the main narrative thread of the Bellas needing to climb their way back to respectability after a disastrous sh...