A few weeks ago, I watched the film, Hustlers. I rented a bunch of movies from the library, and I had wanted to see Hustlers for a while, but I was kind of nervous about seeing it at first because I don’t like vomit scenes in movies (I have emetophobia, which is a fear of vomit) and I read that the film had a few vomit scenes in them (there is a character in the movie named Annabelle, played by Lili Reinhart, who vomits every time she gets nervous. It’s not projectile vomiting thankfully, but it was still kind of gross.) But then I watched an interview that was part of a series that Variety magazine does called Actors on Actors. In this interview series, actors interview each other about their work and their approaches to acting. As someone who knows nothing about acting, it is a really interesting series and it’s also informative because these famous actors, who have taken years to perfect their craft, are talking about what it’s like being an actor. Before watching the series, I had this idea that acting was this glamorous effortless job that was all about fame and fortune, but after watching the series, I realized I had a very shallow, two-dimensional perspective on what goes into acting and making movies. Even though these people love what they do, at the end of the day, it is still a job, and they still have to show up and practice their lines and get in character. There was one episode of Actors on Actors featuring Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lopez. They talked with each other about the movies they were in; Robert was in a film called The Lighthouse and Jennifer Lopez was in the movie Hustlers. Even though I hadn’t seen either of the movies yet, I really love how down-to-earth Jennifer and Robert were in their conversation with each other. You can tell they really, really love acting because they talk about it with such passion, and they loved watching each other’s movies. I think it helped for me to watch both The Lighthouse and Hustlers after seeing the interview, though, because after watching the movies, I was able to appreciate on a deeper level than before the work they did for both of their films. As a high schooler, I remember seeing Robert Pattinson playing Edward Cullen in Twilight and hearing my fellow classmates gush about Edward’s hotness and how he sparkled. I’m glad, though, that he went on to do other work like The Lighthouse and another movie called Good Time, because it shows another side of his acting that I hadn’t seen. Don’t get me wrong; Twilight was great and I admit, I was a bit of a Twilight fanatic back in the day. But then I saw Robert Pattinson in Good Time and then The Lighthouse, and he really takes the acting to another level in these films. In The Lighthouse, he and Willem Dafoe lose their sanity while living on an isolated island in the 19th century, and as the film progresses it gets darker and darker. But the acting was really good. I hadn’t seen Jennifer Lopez’s other films like Selena and Monster-In-Law, but like a lot of people I grew up jamming out to “Jenny from the Block” and “Love Don’t Cost a Thing.” When I saw her in Hustlers I was blown away. I’m not going to lie; Hustlers was an INTENSE movie. Then again, it is about a pretty intense true story. But I’m glad I watched it because I had never heard of it before, and I loved the acting and also the soundtrack for the movie. I love hip-hop, so I loved hearing “I Get Money” by 50 Cent and other songs. The soundtrack features a wide variety of artists, including Fiona Apple, Bob Seger, and a 19th century classical music composer named Frederic Chopin, and honestly each song went so well with each scene. I really love how they used “Night Moves” by Bob Seger for one of the scenes because it’s one of my favorite songs. And I think the song “Royals” by Lorde fits the ending pretty well because of how the film’s events led up to the ending.
If you haven’t seen the film, Hustlers is based on a true story about a group of strippers in New York who got male clients drunk and conned them out of their money. I haven’t read the story yet, but I want to so I can understand what happened in real life and how it compares to how the director depicted it in the movie. The movie is about a stripper named Destiny (played by Constance Wu) living in New York City who is struggling to take care of her grandmother, who is struggling to pay off her debts. She isn’t able to make much money from the male clients who frequent the strip club, but then she sees one of the strippers, Ramona, performing a dance to “Criminal” by Fiona Apple and making it rain with money as male clients shower her with dollar bills. Destiny approaches Ramona about her techniques and skills and wants to learn from her so she can earn more money, and Ramona shows her how to do certain moves and attract more clients. I really love the scene in which Ramona dances to “Criminal” not just because I am a huge Fiona Apple fan, but because I just loved how Ramona got really into it while dancing. Destiny makes more money, and she is able to go back to school and help her grandmother get out of debt. Destiny also meets a really cute guy at a party and they start dating and have a daughter together (I didn’t know that Destiny’s boyfriend was played by the rapper G-Eazy until I saw the end credits. He looked really familiar.)
However, things take a turn when the Wall Street financial crisis happens, and the dancers who work at these clubs find themselves losing male clients who can’t afford to keep going out to the clubs. Destiny also has a fight with her boyfriend, and they break up, leaving her to raise her daughter alone. Ramona is also struggling to pay her rent and take care of her daughter. Ramona ends up hatching a plan for her and Destiny to get together with some other dancers and put drugs in the male clients’ drinks and take all the money off of their credit cards while these men were unconscious from drinking drugged alcohol. For some reason, I thought about this movie I watched a few months ago called The Big Short, which is about the 2008 Wall Street crash. There is a scene that takes place shortly before the crash and it takes place at a strip club, and one of the people working in Wall Street who is warning people about the upcoming housing market crisis is telling a young woman working as a dancer at the strip club about how the housing market bubble is going to burst and people are going to lose everything in the financial crisis, and she refuses to believe that anything bad is going to happen by people inflating their lifestyles. She says in the scene that since things seem so great with the housing market, she owns four or five of these big homes and dealing with these properties (I forgot exactly what she said she did with the houses since I saw the movie a while ago) is another way she can invest in the market. However, as the movie progresses, the prospect of people holding onto that wealth looks really, really bleak. The movie shows how people are getting evicted from their homes, losing their jobs and being unable to make ends meet. During the financial crisis, with less men going to the strip clubs, Ramona and the other dancers have to take on extra hours at their day jobs to make ends meet. The plan to drug the male clients seems to work out at first, and there is a scene where Ramona and the other strip club dancers are celebrating in this big, luxurious apartment over the Christmas holidays with the expensive gifts that Ramona bought them with the money she and the other strippers took from the male clients’ bank accounts. Eventually, Ramona and Destiny get caught and Destiny has to speak to a reporter named Elizabeth (played by Julia Stiles) about everything that went down.
Another thing I loved about the film was the acting. It was incredible. I hadn’t seen much of Constance Wu’s other works other than Crazy Rich Asians, which she was also really good in. She acted the heck out of Destiny in Hustlers: the emotions, the facial expressions, the dancing. She and Jennifer Lopez both gave really powerful performances, and they put their all into expressing the dynamics between Ramona and Destiny in their friendship. Even when they call off the friendship after what transpires, they still share a struggle as these single moms who are trying to survive and make ends meet and also deal with disrespect and discrimination from society as women of color who are also strippers. The friendship dynamic between Ramona and Destiny kind of reminded me of this movie I saw called Zola, which is also about stripping and tensions in female friendship. If you haven’t seen Zola, it is based on a true Twitter thread by A’Ziah “Zola” Wells (last name formerly King) who worked as a stripper in Detroit and went on a trip to Florida with a white girl named Jessica Jessica’s boyfriend, Jared, and Jessica’s pimp. The trip ended up being a sex trafficking operation and Jessica ended up putting Zola’s life in jeopardy. In the movie, Zola (played by Taylour Paige) is working at a Hooter’s in Detroit, Michigan, and one day while serving she encounters a white girl named Stefani (played by Riley Keough). Stefani and Zola bond over being strippers, and they follow each other on social media and become fast friends. Stefanie texts her one evening telling her that a friend of hers told her about some opportunities in Florida to make extra money dancing. At first Zola is skeptical, and so is her fiancé, but Zola ends up taking the trip because her and Stefani are becoming such great friends, and so Zola packs her bags and goes with Stefani, Stefani’s boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and Stefani’s pimp named X (Colman Domingo). At first, they are all bonding over their time together in the car on the way to Florida and rapping, twerking and jamming to “Hannah Montana” by Migos. But as the trip wears on, Zola starts to notice some red flags in her friendship with Stefani, and as the movie progresses, she realizes that Stefani lied to her about this being just a fun trip for them to make extra money as dancers. Zola had to advocate for Stefani to charge more for clients she was having sex with because X wasn’t letting her charge more for her services. It’s also exhausting for Zola to have to watch Stefani have sex with all these clients, and also hard for Stefani’s boyfriend Derrek because he loves her and seeing her get involved in what turns out to be a sex trafficking operation is painful for him because he doesn’t want her to get hurt. Thankfully they make it out alive, but Zola is still traumatized and scarred by what Stefani put her through, and she feels (rightfully) betrayed that this girl she thought was her friend lied to her and put her in a dangerous situation. Zola realizes that Stefani was just taking advantage of her and wasn’t actually a true friend who cared about Zola’s safety. Sure, they both had in common that they were dancers, but at the end of the day, Stefani was only going to look out for her own interests and Zola even shouts at Stefani that her “brain is broke” for putting her through this crazy situation. There is a scene where Stefani briefly tells the story of how her and Zola fell out, but her side of the story is so ridiculous and makes Zola look like the bad guy instead of Stefani. She portrays herself as this good white Christian woman wearing a suit and wearing her hair in this neat bun, while Zola is shown with straw in her hair and later wearing a large trash bag. It is so absurd because I knew that Stefani’s version of the story was inaccurate while Zola was telling the truth about what happened. The film also showed the racial dynamics in their friendship. There is a scene in the film where Stefani is telling this offensive story about a Black woman and she says a lot of disrespectful things, like describing the woman as having a “nappy-ass head” and Zola is realizing, Yikes this white girl is real racist. It’s clear by the time the film is over that Zola and Stefani never actually had a genuine friendship, and even after all the shit that Stefani put Zola through during the course of the movie, she expects Zola to still love her and be her friend, but Zola ignores her as they continue the trip back home. The movie showed me that friendships can be messy even if you share a common experience with the person, and that’s why I thought about Zola when I was writing this review about Hustlers because it’s about female friendship and the complicated parts of that friendship, including how hard it is to leave toxic friendships. Zola couldn’t just go home and forget what happened; Stefani, Derrek and X put her through a LOT of shit, and Zola didn’t have her own car to just get away when shit hit the fan. She put up with a lot of nonsense, and was in a dangerous situation where X was threatening to kill her if she didn’t go with him and Stefani’s plans. Similarly, Destiny couldn’t just walk away from her friendship with Ramona and forget that Ramona had her participate in doing something illegal and was also getting her to involve other strippers in drugging the male clients. What Ramona put Destiny through was pretty intense, and so when Elizabeth (the journalist) asks Destiny about her friendship with Ramona and how they ended up falling out, Destiny is reluctant to talk about it because their friendship was so complicated.
I need to head to bed, but overall, I recommend watching Hustlers. It is an excellent movie.
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