Hustle (TV series)
Hustle is a British television crime drama series starring Adrian Lester, Robert Glenister and Robert Vaughn. Created by Tony Jordan, it was produced by Kudos Film and Television, and broadcast on BBC One in the United Kingdom. The show premiered on 24 February 2004, and ran for eight series, with its final episode aired on 17 February 2012. The show's premise is on a group of con artists who specialise in "long cons" - extended forms of deceptive frauds that require greater commitment, but offer higher rewards than simple confidence tricks. The show most notable qualities is on plots that involve behind-the-scenes action that the viewers are unaware of until near the end of an episode, as well as fantasy scenes and occasional breaches of the fourth wall by the main actors.
The Monkey Hustle
The film includes a loose plot centered on the ensemble cast of characters in which Foxx mentors "Baby D" (Calloway), "Player" (Carter), and "Tiny" (Harper) in the ways of small-time hustling. An example of a hustle is the boys apparently stealing some televisions from a truck for Foxx in sight of a local shop owner. The boys then steal the televisions from Foxx's truck and stash them in some trash. The shop owner offers the boys $55 cash for the televisions which they accept. However, when the shop owner returns with his dolly, he finds that the boys have run off with the cash as well as the televisions (which were actually empty boxes). The overarching plotline is to prevent the construction of an expressway through the neighborhood in which all the characters reside. Using facilities that are not adequately described in the film, Foxx and local numbers man "Glitterin' Goldie" (Moore) use potentially corrupt connections within the city government to prevent the construction.Roger Ebert, writing in the "Chicago Sun-Times", gave the film one-and-half stars (out of four), calling it a "good-hearted muddle" but opining that "they must have left half the script back in Hollywood." Ebert did note with pleasure that the film's business justified opening the balcony at the now-demolished Roosevelt Theater, where he hadn't sat in four years. Edward Blank in the "Pittsburgh Press" viewed the film more harshly, saying it should have been rated "R" (instead of PG) for its "low moral tone" and that it was "disconcerting" to see Yaphet Kotto and Rosalind Cash "slumming." In 2009, "Black Dynamite" star and co-writer Michael Jai White cited "The Monkey Hu$tle" as a major influence, telling the "Los Angeles Times", "It was just brash, unlike anything I'd ever seen... I remember these bigger-than-life characters, who reminded me of my uncles, and it was the first time I saw anything familiar in my life on the big screen." "The Monkey Hustle" was released to DVD by MGM on January 20, 2004 in a Region 1 "standard full screen" (1.33:1) aspect ratio DVD.