Sorry but the film was pretty awesome. That scene, with the music, was totally true to the supporting female's character, her mania. The scene was a juxtaposition of her cosmic out-of-touchness with the very real consequences of what her actions had brought about. Both Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence were scary they were so good in their roles. The male actors were all good though I thought only Christian Bale brought the same level of serious gravity to his performance as the women.

If I have any complaints it's that some of the performances felt like a serious film while others (everyone in the FBI for instance) felt more comedic, with Jeremy Renner somewhere in between...mostly serious but how can you take a man seriously with that hair?

Character pieces go where the characters take them. Narrative flow doesn't really enter the picture. I don't even get Scorcese comparisons. I wasn't thinking about him at all. He doesn't, until recently, make stories with sympathetic leads, for one thing. His humor is far darker, far less "dramedy". Until he met DiCaprio he made films almost exclusively about despicable people who do horrible things and you watch because it's interesting, not because you care about them, and you watch to see how the story ends.

You know they deserve whatever fate has in store for them, for their sins. They're only marginally human. With his latest film he seems back to that formula even with DiCaprio, what I've read and heard about The Wolf of Wall Street. Pass.

Anyway, that's my $0.02 since we're not talking about cameras and lights and technique anymore, though it looked great. I was expecting to be annoyed by the whole thing being steadicam, which has a floaty quality, but it was well done, unlike the technique used in The Conjuring which was of a similar period but felt completely anachronistic, calling attention to itself throughout that picture, a situation compounded by a poor choice of fisheye lens. The 24mm used in American Hustle, however, felt wide without ever feeling cartoonish.