The Company Men (2011)

As the latest film to take on this modern financial crisis and its societal impact, The Company Men makes for an excellent companion piece to 2009’s Up In the Air. A careful and diligent character piece, John Wells’ film approaches the massive layoffs and power shifts (in Boston, circa 2008) from the view of the once successful, now unemployed – confident men with handsome features and distinguished ideals forced to reevaluate everything they thought life was meant to be. It is a movie of crisis, and more specifically, a movie of wealth in crisis. And as such it may seem not entirely appealing – who wants to watch the haves complaining about having not? Still, the movie manages to create sympathy from our empathy, concentrating not on the materials but the people who purchase them, the people who are, more or less, just like “us”.

Cinewise Throwback - Gone Baby Gone (2007)

When I first moved out to Los Angeles just over three years ago, the first movie I saw in theaters was Rob Zombie's Halloween remake. 

It was not a promising start.

A month later we got Gone Baby Gone, a film that simultaneously reminded me why I loved Boston so much, and why I'd decided to move 3,000 miles away from it.  Ben Affleck's directorial debut is a striking testament to the power of cinema, to it's ability to make us think, make us feel, and make us do. 

Three years later, as Affleck's sophomore effort cements him as a film force, I look back at what I said about his debut then...

The Town (2010)

The Town is a crackling crime thriller, churning and burning with the perception and execution the guys behind Takers can only pretend to dream of. Like so many of its brethren, director/writer/star Ben Affleck’s caper rolls along the familiar roads of “one last job” cinema, slamming through timeworn potholes as it dodges its police tail while balancing complicated brotherhood relationships and dangerous new romances. It could easily have been “this generation’s Heat” but chooses not to be, even as it lays down fire to the familiar score of Michael Mann cinema. Instead The Town opts for the East Coast blue collar rout, snubbing L.A’s gloss for Celtic pride as it establishes itself as the most Boston of crime dramas.