Filmography: I Heart Huckabees (2004), The Fighter (2010), Silver Linings Playbook (2012), American Hustle (2013) The reinvention of David O. Russell has been a fascinating and contentious one. For early Russell devotees who were proclaiming the brilliance of films such as Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees, Russell became a cause of the perpetually underappreciated director. However, audiences weren't biting and Russell's publicly abrasive attitude towards some of his actors gave him a bad reputation in Hollywood. In order to overcome this, Russell had to reinvent himself, and what came out of this rebirth was a trilogy of films (The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle) that scored big at the box office and even bigger with critics and the Academy Awards. Russell's newfound success has been a controversial one in some quarters though, as the most ardent defenders of his early work have begun to brand him with the "sellout" label, claiming his new films are nothing but cotton candy fluff. Wherever you fall on the Russell divide though, one thing that is undeniable is that the man has a style of his own. With a madcap sense of pacing, full of quick and snappy dialogue, Russell is the post-modern inheritor of the screwball comedy. The relative success of a Russell film largely depends on how well his unique style of up-tempo comedic beats blends with the genre he's working in, but when the fit is right, he can really hit it out of the ballpark.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
