Hair sometimes gives it away. You can't ride the rails in tsarist Russia with a 20th century fall on top of your head. Accents sometimes do it. In fact, you can actually tell the difference between an actor on film and an interview of a real person on film. I suppose some actors are real people, but even with hours of pretend candid footage under our belts, we can just tell when film is shot rather than caught. And usually there is something in the quality of the film processing that makes it look old, and I suppose current directors don't want to make their movies look like that; apart from putting some cosmetically unpleasing too-uniform scratches on a clip or making it a little jumpy on purpose by sending it through at an off speed.
Parkland captures something of 1963 so well that the clips used, even though they are so familiar, don't seem jarring.
Both films feature great acting. I so rarely watch a whole movie without complaining about at least one of the actors; and both of these movies left me thinking of characters as people, not characters as actors.
Jacki Weaver stole the show again. It's not a nuanced performance, but she wasn't playing a nuanced lady. Every minute she's on the screen; that's where you look.
American Hustle took me back to a time that I remember.
Neither film had me thinking that I was watching a previous decade when I wasn't, but they captured that time for me. I don't really know what hospitals and the FBI were like in 1963, but I think they were like Parkland. But I clearly remember guys as obnoxious as the men in American Hustle when society didn't seem to mind. Do you remember alpha males not having to be seen as nice? I do. Times have changed.
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