Tag: Ben Affleck
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Netflix’s Triple Frontier is aggro, macho horseshit
J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier, Netflix’s latest high-profile exclusive, aspires to be a serious Expendables. It draws surface-level inspiration from the likes of Heat and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but forgets that you need more than square jaws and gun porn. There’s some dramatic potential in the premise of a heist orchestrated by veterans…
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Exhaustively exhausted: Ben Affleck’s Live by Night
Has any topic been more exhaustively dramatized than Prohibition-era gangsters? Live by Night seems especially redundant so soon after HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, which covers a lot of the same ground: the Florida/Cuba liquor pipeline, the Irish/Italian mob conflict, the pivot to legal gambling, etc. The explanation being pretty simple: original novelist Denis Lehane also contributed…
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The Accountant is A Brilliant Mind meets Death Wish
You can imagine the elevator pitch: “A Brilliant Mind meets Death Wish! Ben Affleck! Anna Kendrick!” Director Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant flirts with righteous anger at big business financial corruption, but wimps out by ultimately fingering a single venal individual with a hired army of faceless mercenaries. There’s nothing engaging about a plot that can…
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Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy is his best film
Chasing Amy is far and away Kevin Smith’s best film, and not coincidentally his most heartfelt. It’s not nothing to tell a universal guy’s story while still featuring significant and sympathetic female characters. Yes, Chasing Amy is spectacularly profane and the characters are prone to giving extended on-the-nose speeches perfectly explicating their inner motivations, but…
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Ben Affleck’s pervasively grim Gone Baby Gone
Good ol’ Bahstuhn Cahtholick Ben Affleck is an all grown-up, big-boy director now, and lookit, he made himself a pretty decent movie. That said, Gone Baby Gone is a big plate of grim, with side order of depressing. Affleck makes excellent use of location footage and local color. And not surprising for a movie directed…
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John Woo’s Paycheck isn’t fun, weird, or subversive enough for a Philip K. Dick tale
When it comes to action cinema maestros like John Woo — I can enjoy the the hyped-up action and weirdness of something like Face/Off, but find that the extreme violence and gunplay can sometimes cross the line from escapism into being inhumane. Paycheck, scoring a mere PG-13 from the MPAA, is less violent than most…