Review: Justice League (2017)

* * 1/2
Director: Zack Snyder
Starring: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Jason Mamoa, Ezra Miller, Ray Fisher

You know what? It's not terrible. That's not just lowered expectations speaking, either, because I had low expectations when I saw Batman v Superman and that movie still managed to sail right under the low bar my mind had set. It's not a great movie - it's got the problems you would expect not only from a film that had to be significantly re-shot but also from a project driven by the impatience of those who are guiding it to the screen - but it's pretty entertaining in a silly, weightless kind of way. Which is why it's so unfortunate that audiences, having been burned by 2 of DC's last 3 movies, seem to be staying away. I mean, Justice League doesn't deserve to make Wonder Woman level money, but it definitely deserves to make more than Batman v Superman and to not be the movie that fails to make enough money to render its critical reception moot.

Review: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

* 1/2
Director: Zack Snyder
Starring: Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck

So it's come to this. I liked Wonder Woman so much that I decided to finally check out Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice so that I could see her first onscreen appearance. That was my mistake and boy did I pay for it. It's not that I didn't expect this movie to be flawed, I had heard and read enough about it to know better than to have very high expectations, but I still didn't expect it to be quite such a ramshackle affair. I'm genuinely baffled - how do you screw something up this horribly? And why, if you're trying to compete with what Marvel is doing, would you sink $250 million into making this before you have a script that functions to tell an actual story? One can only hope that those who need to learned from the mistakes made here, because otherwise Justice League has the potential to be an even bigger mess.

Review: Gone Girl (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: David Fincher
Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike

Because professional film critics seem to be taking great pains to avoid talking about spoilers in Gone Girl, I'm going to state right off the top that this is going to be a fairly spoilery review. If you've managed to remain unspoiled about this story, then don't read any further - although the fact that I'm not even sure how that's possible is one of the reasons I decided to go full-spoiler. I didn't even read the novel but went into the film aware of the plot twist because the book was so ubiquitous. The other reason I have no hesitation in discussing the plot in some detail is because the twist is, frankly, the least interesting thing about this story. That's not a knock on Gone Girl, which is a first rate thriller that unfolds with the sort of ferocious precision we've all come to expect from David Fincher; it's just an acknowledgment of the fact that there's so much going on here that the inner workings of the plot are really a secondary concern.

Netflix Recommends... Runner Runner (2013)

* 1/2
Director: Brad Furman
Starring: Justin Timberlake, Ben Affleck, Gemma Arterton

I've mentioned before that whatever algorithm Netflix uses to create its recommendations is basically incomprehensible. A while ago Netflix "recommended" The Canyons for me, even though its best guess for how I would rate it was 1.5 stars. This time Netflix recommended Runner Runner despite assuming that I would rate it 1.5 stars (good guess!). Now, I learned a lesson with The Canyons, but I was intrigued by the fact that Netflix was recommending Runner Runner to me based on my having watched Orange is the New Black. What on earth, I wondered, could a gambling thriller headlined by Justin Timberlake and Ben Affleck have in common with a comedy/drama series set in a women's prison? I won't leave you in suspense: nothing. There is absolutely nothing that Runner Runner and Orange is the New Black have in common, unless you count the fact that every once in a while characters in each speak a little bit of Spanish.

Review: To the Wonder (2013)

* *
Director: Terrence Malick
Starring: Olga Kurylenko,Ben Affleck, Javier Bardem, Rachel McAdams

Typical of Terrence Malick's work, To the Wonder is an absolutely beautiful film to look at. Also typical of Malick, it's a narratively elusive piece, set firmly in its characters' interior lives. Atypically, at least for me (Malick is an acquired taste), it's a film that doesn't ever really come together, one that it at once intimate and small in scale, and yet far too broad, a ponderous, shapeless story of failed loves and crises of faith. The visuals alone almost make the film worth watching, but To the Wonder doesn't really leave you with enough to hold onto for its impact to be anything but superficial.

Review: Argo (2012)

* * * *
Director: Ben Affleck
Starring: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, John Goodman

When it comes to movies and marketing, a little hype can go a long way. Sometimes hype sets expectations too high, making a perfectly good film seem disappointing, but every once in a while a film is equal to the advance word and Argo is certainly one of them. All the talk about the film being a legitimate Best Picture threat is entirely justified, which is all the more amazing when you consider that the film is so thoroughly a genre piece. A taut suspense thriller that plays all the right notes at exactly the right time, Argo is the kind of movie that is "old fashioned" in the best possible way.

Review: The Company Men (2010)

* * * 1/2
Director: John Wells
Starring: Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper

There are casualties in every Oscar season, films that fly too far under the radar and just generally have bad timing. If the release of John Wells' The Company Men had been handled differently, if it had been given time to find an audience and develop some momentum, it probably would have secured a nomination or two. Coming a year after the similarly themed, and much more tightly focused, Up In The Air it probably wouldn't have cracked the Best Picture lineup, but its individual elements could have garnered some much deserved attention.

Review: The Town (2010)

* * *
Director: Ben Affleck
Starring: Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Jon Hamm

The Ben Affleck career renaissance continues and gathers steam with The Town, his directorial follow-up to Gone, Baby, Gone. Like its predecessor, it is a gritty, Boston-set thriller, though I don't know that it has quite the same emotional impact. Still, it's a competently made and executed genre picture and worth a look.

The film is set in the neighborhood of Charlestown, which we are told is home to a high concentration of bank robbers, and opens with a bank robbery. Doug (Affleck), Jem (Jeremy Renner), Desmond (Owen Burke), and Gloansy (Slaine) - the team behind the heist - proceed with the ruthless efficiency of professionals, though experience has done little to temper Jem's impulsiveness. Jem decides that they'll take the bank's manager, Claire (Rebecca Hall), hostage, and though they let her go physically unharmed, they've left a considerable pscyhological imprint. When they learn afterwards that she lives in Charlestown, they agree that they need to make sure she doesn't know anything that could link them to the crime. Not wanting hot-headed Jem to make a bad situation worse, Doug opts to take care of it himself.

Doug "meets" Claire in a laundromat and begins a relationship with her which inspires him to want more out of life. Certainly he doesn't want to end up like his father (Chris Cooper), who will spend the rest of his life in prison. He tells Jem that their next job will be his last but his declaration meets with fierce resistance. For one thing, Jem doesn't want to break up the crew. For another, he doesn't want to let Doug walk out on Krista (Blake Lively), his on-again, off-again girlfriend who is also Jem's sister. Furthermore, their boss, Fergie (Pete Postlethwaite), isn't willing to let him walk away and warns Doug that bad things will happen to people he loves unless he falls back in line. Doug reluctantly agrees to play ball, though he knows that the heat - in the form of FBI agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) - is on and the walls are closing in.

The acting in the film is very strong, as it should be with such a great cast. Doug is the strong silent type and Affleck plays him well, especially against Renner, whose Jem is a bundle of energy looking for a means to violently expend itself; Doug is the calm, Jem is the storm. Though he makes a lot of noise about the trouble Claire could bring them, Jem is the real wild card, the character whose actions threaten to bring hell down on everyone, and Renner pretty much steals the show. Hall, Hamm and Lively all turn in solid performances, though their characters never get to become much more than "types" and Postlethwaite and Cooper make the most of little screentime (Cooper is only in one scene but it's an effective and memorable one).

The direction here is confident and assured, particularly in the action scenes. There's a terrific chase sequence through narrow streets about half-way through the film that makes for a great set-piece, as does the prolonged shoot-out that marks the story's climax. The quieter moments of the film are handled equally well, firmly establishing a sense of place and the rules of the setting. Early on Doug and Claire have a discussion about kids calling her a "tunie," a conversation which nicely addresses the changes that gentrification is bringing to the established order of the neighborhood without beating the audience over the head with the point. The only real criticism that I have of the screenplay is that the ending seems a little too tidy and, perhaps, not fully earned. It isn't enough of a character-driven drama for the ending to comfortably fit with the rest of the film. Still, it's a solid effort and, alongside Gone, Baby, Gone, announces Affleck as a director worth watching.

Oscarstravaganza: Good Will Hunting

* * * *

Winner: Best Original Screenplay, 1997
Director: Gus Van Sant
Starring: Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Minnie Driver, Ben Affleck

I love Good Will Hunting. I know that its diamond in the rough type story isn’t exactly groundbreaking and that there’s always been some controversy regarding how much Matt Damon and Ben Affleck actually did versus how much they were credited with for the sake of crafting a great off-screen story, but I still love it. A friend and I even invented a drinking game for it: drink every time Affleck shows up in a different track suit. You might not make it to the end of the film that way.

Will Hunting (Damon) is a genius, a man whose uncommon intelligence is hindered only by his circumstances. An orphan who has spent most of his life being shuffled between foster homes and in and out of state custody, he’s the kind of person society tends to just give up on. By day he hangs out with his friends Chuckie (Affleck), Billy (Cole Hauser), and Morgan (Casey Affleck), getting into various forms of trouble, and by night he works as a janitor at MIT. Taking advantage of the seemingly empty building that he’s cleaning, he takes a crack at the problem written on the board of math professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgard). Lambeau, shocked by the fact that the janitor found the solution that none of his students could decipher, takes Will on as a project, determined to mentor him to bigger and better things.

Lambeau soon enlists the help of Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), a psychiatrist with whom he was once friends, and Sean is slowly able to break through Will’s defences in order to give him actual help for his issues. In the process, Will also helps Sean deal with the death of his wife and break the stasis of his mourning. Meanwhile, Will also finds himself navigating a relationship with Skylar (Minnie Driver), whom he likes but who also makes him very self-conscious about his rough upbringing and his current economic situation. Between them, Sean, Skylar and Will's posse of friends will help him break free of the trappings that Will is afraid to challenge.

Embraced when it was first released, Good Will Hunting experienced an inevitable backlash later on (Premiere Magazine once named it as one of the 20 Most Overrated Movies of All Time), but seems to have regained its original good standing in recent years. It is, in fact, a very strong effort on all sides, particularly in terms of writing. There are three key scenes that make up the heart and soul of this story: Will's park bench conversation with Sean, in which Sean exposes and effectively dismantles Will's greatest defence mechanism (the vast knowledge he tries to pass off as experience/wisdom) and dares him to get real; the scene in which Lambeau falls to his knees, acknowledging that while he can recognize Will's genius, he himself can never attain it; and the scene between Will and Chuckie during which Chuckie lambasts Will for wasting his abilities by not taking a chance at getting more. Williams won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his performance, but I've always thought that Affleck's was the strongest of the supporting performances and his speech during this last scene (my favourite of the whole movie) demonstrates why, capturing both Chuckie's jealousy and admiration of his friend, his dissatisfaction with his own lot in life and the pride he would feel to see someone from the neighborhood succeed. The speech is a bit cliche, but Affleck sells it and Damon sells Will's reaction to it. The two play off each other so well and so easily that it's hard to believe they haven't worked together onscreen since Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Seriously, someone team them up again!

Good Will Hunting is an interesting film to revisit 13 years after the fact. You see Damon rendering a confident, charismatic performance, still fresh but so close to stardom that you can already see it in him; Affleck in a loose, relaxed performance that would seem impossible just a few years later when he was mired in the dual disasters of Pearl Harbor and Bennifer 1.0; Williams in a relatively sedate, dialed back performance; and Van Sant crossing over to the mainstream for that brief period before returning to the offbeat indies that are his bread and butter. The evolutions of these careers since this film have been interesting, to say the least, but the film is much more than a snapshot of people coming together to capture lightning in a bottle. Good Will Hunting remains an excellent film, entertaining, energetic and ultimately moving.

Rewind Review: Gone, Baby, Gone (2007)

Director: Ben Affleck
Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Amy Ryan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman

Two years ago today I reviewed Gone, Baby, Gone as my very first post on this blog. Since then I've reviewed approximately 350 other movies, but naturally Ben Affleck's directorial debut has retained a special place in my heart for being the first. To celebrate my second blogging anniversary I thought it would be fun to look back at the movie that started it all and examine how (or, indeed, if) my feelings about it have changed in the last two years.

Gone, Baby, Gone, based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, is a morality play disguised as a crime drama. Its ending hinges on the question of whether the right thing is what is technically right, or whether the right thing can come from something that is technically wrong. It presents a world of moral murkiness and decisions that can seem simultaneously right and wrong. For example, it's wrong of Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) to shoot an unarmed child molester and killer in the back of the head. But, on the other hand, given the horrors the dead man inflicted on others, it feels more like a visit from karma than a perversion of justice. Similarly, it is wrong of the people who took Amanda McCready to take it upon themselves to decide that her mother is unfit and then bypass the law to remove her from her mother's care. But, learning what we do about her mother, Helene (Amy Ryan), through the course of the film... you can see their point. The greatest strength of the film is that it doesn't present a simple, watered down view of right and wrong; it asks difficult questions and then forces the audience to try to answer them.

The atmosphere of the film is established immediately as the camera pans through neighborhood streets and we're sunk into a world so insular that everybody knows everybody else, if not directly than through the chain of relationships. The film's depiction of place feels real and so do the characters in it. When Pulp Fiction came out, Quentin Tarrantino was praised to the heavens for his ear for dialogue, for the way that he crafted the interactions between his characters to get to the heart of their relationships with each other. Affleck and co-writer Aaron Stockard didn't receive such praise, but listen to the way the characters talk to each other. Listen to the way that Dottie (Jill Quigg) assesses Angie (Michelle Monaghan) upon seeing her for the first time since high school, or to the dialogue between Patrick, Angie and Helene as they drive to where Helene hid the money she ripped off from a drug dealer. These conversations recount a shared history that just bubbles up to the surface of the film and then goes under again, offering a glimpse of the story beyond the frames of the film.

I liked this film a lot when it first came out - though "like" seems an inappropriate word to apply to something this dark - and really only had a couple of issues it. One was the use of flashbacks, which aren't quite as intrusive as I'd remembered. The other was the film's depiction of Angie, which I still find problematic. Gone, Baby, Gone is one in a series of books by Lehane, all of which I've read multiple times. One of the things I like about the books is that Angie is so kick ass, but the film version of the character is a shadow of the original and I find that extremely disappointing. To take a character that compelling and remove all vitality from her so that she's little more than an appendage for the male hero is the adaptation's one glaring weakness.

For her role in this film Ryan received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress and seeing the performance again reconfirmed for me how deserving a winner she would have been (the award that year went to Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton). It would be easy to say that any actress could have secured a nomination playing this role; the character has a lot of meat to it and it's a strong role before any performer ever gets theirs hands on it. But, nevertheless, Ryan's depiction of Helene amounts to more than simply showing up. She seems to approach the character from the inside out, rendering a lived-in performance that in fact makes the "performance" aspect disappear. She's at ease with this character and unafraid of looking foul and in her truthful, no holds barred portrayal she makes Helene entirely her own.

As I write this, Affleck is at work on The Town, his second feature as director. If what he achieves with Gone, Baby, Gone is any indication, The Town will be a film to watch for. His work here is strong and assured and he has a firm grasp of how to create and maintain tension throughout a story. He's a good director with a great deal of potential - let's just hope the projects he choses as director are closer to Good Will Hunting than Gigli.

Review: State of Play (2009)

* * * 1/2
Director:Kevin MacDonald
Starring: Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren

State of Play is a refreshingly smart and adult film from director Kevin MacDonald. Based on the British miniseries of the same name, the Americanized version is a fast paced procedural thriller with a couple of great performances to its credit. Is it an instant classic? No, but it’s a solid, well-made movie and better than the average post-Oscar/pre-summer fare.

It begins with a double murder, when a street kid and a pizza delivery guy in the wrong place at the wrong time are gunned down in cold blood. At first it seems like a run of the mill drug related offense but soon connections start to be made between this crime and the more high profile murder of Sonia Baker, an aide to Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck). Collins’ college roommate was Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), now a reporter with the Washington Globe and the greatest champion of Collins’ innocence. Collins is currently investigating the practices of PointCorp., a private militia that has been making a fortune in Iraq, and for McAffrey the murder and subsequent revelation of the victim’s affair with Collins reeks of a ploy to discredit the investigation.

McAffrey is teamed up with young reporter Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), whom he intends to give a crash course in real reporting. McAffrey is part of a dying breed – the print reporter who deals in hard facts – while Frye is representative of the future – an internet writer (dismissed by McAffrey as a blogger – horrors!) who deals primarily in gossip and speculation. They get off to a rough start but are soon working together like a real team under the watchful and increasingly irritated eye on their Editor-in -Chief, Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren in a delightfully bitchy performance). Their investigation puts them in the cross-hairs of various nefarious factions and forces McAffrey to confront truths about his friend – and his friend’s wife (Robin Wright) – that he’d rather not acknowledge.

Crowe is an actor whose skill I admire a great deal though few of the films he’s made in the past decade have sparked my interest. He plays McAffrey as a man who obviously loves his job and is dedicated to it at the expense of personal relationships. More than once the Collinses accuse him of using them and their friendship for the sake of furthering his story and he has little to say in his own defence. Crowe renders a performance that is well-rounded in a way that few actors bother with for their non-Oscar bait fare. Mirren is the other standout of the cast and the scenes between the two crackle with energy. The whole film could have just been the two of them discussing the story and it would have made for a highly entertaining viewing experience. McAdams holds her own with both and Affleck is well-cast as the crusading but all too human politician, though it takes some suspension of disbelief to buy that he, Crowe and Wright were all in college together.

Though the film has all the hallmarks of your average thriller – the twisting plot, good guys who end up being bad guys, the killer who is always one step ahead – it’s focus on the mechanics of how the reporters put their exposé together gives it more weight and substance, making it closer in spirit to a film like All The President’s Men than the more forgettable fare that gets tossed out so often. One of the things that makes State of Play so different – and one of the things I really liked about it – is that the characters react to things like people rather than characters. So often in films people get shot at and then shrug it off like it’s nothing; here the characters are allowed to be scared, even the hero.

I’ve never seen the original State of Play but having seen this version, I really want to. I think that a good way to measure an adaptation is by how much it makes you want to seek out the source material, and in that respect this one is extremely successful. I’m sad to see that State of Play isn’t finding more success – particularly in a year that saw Paul Blart: Mall Cop at #1 for like 4 weeks – but hopefully it will find an audience once it comes out on DVD because it definitely deserves to be seen.

Review: Gone, Baby, Gone

As a fan of both the source novel and of Ben Affleck, I’ll admit that I went into this with my fingers crossed, just hoping that it didn’t get screwed up. It doesn’t; this is a great adaptation. It departs somewhat from the novel – the novel is the fourth in a series and in it Patrick Kenzie and Angie Genaro are seasoned pros; here they’re new to the game and their experience so far has been limited to looking for people who’ve skipped out on their creditors – but it gets the essence of the story just right. This is a film that is very comfortable with its place and with the people in it, and we come to know the rhythm of the city and the way that these people get around in it.


The plot: 4 year old Amanda McCready is kidnapped in the middle of the night. Her aunt (Amy Madigan) doesn’t think the police are doing enough to find her, so she hires Patrick (Casey Affleck) and Angie (Michelle Monaghan) to do some extra leg work. Pretty soon Patrick and Angie (mostly Patrick – I’ll get to that momentarily) are figuring out that things don’t exactly add up, drawing themselves into the line of fire and, ultimately, a moral conundrum.

The characters are tightly drawn and the performances are uniformly good, especially those of Amy Ryan and Ed Harris. Ryan is pitch perfect as the coked up mother of the kidnapped girl; if you’ve read the novel, you’ll think she walked right off the page and into the movie. Harris, playing the lead investigator who alternates between anger at Patrick for getting in his way, and admiration for Patrick’s ability, is very effective as the skewed moral compass of this dark and scary world. Together these two characters make a pretty effective argument for doing the wrongs things for the right reasons.

I only have two real qualms with the film, which is on the whole a solid effort by Affleck as both writer and director. First, the character of Angie. In the novels, she’s a force to be reckoned with, a tough talking ass kicker. In the film her presence is so far diminished that she barely registers. The character essentially exists to offer Patrick comfort when things look bleak and to act as a sounding board for his thoughts and theories. Admittedly the novels, like the movie, are told from Patrick’s point of view, but at least in the novels one didn’t get the sense that Angie was just along for the ride. She was always in the thick of things, starting as much trouble as Patrick does.

The other problem is the use of flashbacks, the style of which seems to have been ripped off from CSI. It is a complicated plot, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the audience needs to be reminded of something that happened five minutes ago in order to follow, and the flashbacks to things we hadn’t already seen could have been dealt with in a more effective way. As it is, they took me right out of the movie due largely to the aforementioned similarity to the CSI style of storytelling.

But these are minor problems in a movie that is overall very good. It’s well paced and suspenseful, even if you’re familiar with the book. Come Oscar time, the performance by Ryan and the screenplay by Affleck and Aaron Stockard will hopefully be remembered and rightly honoured.