The Town ***

Director: Ben Affleck
Cast: Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall
Blake Lively, Chris Cooper, Titus Welliver, Slaine, Pete Postlethwaite

Who would've guessed that in his directing Ben Affleck would manifest all the straightforwardness he fails to present in his redundant work as a thespian? The Town is barely his second directorial effort and already he's developing what could be called a style. Of course Affleck's style is highly influenced, if not directly extracted, from the work of Clint Eastwood (the cinematography and sense of in-justice) and Martin Scorsese (the seductiveness of crime as a lifestyle) but with this and Gone Baby Gone he seems to have mastered what it takes to deliver a no-bullshit film in what can be referred to as a "classic style".
His film is straight out of this universe where crime is the only kind of life and the one everyone's trying to escape. Affleck plays Doug MacRay, a career criminal who falls in love with Claire (Hall), the bank manager he takes hostage after one of his gang's heists gets threatening.
In Claire, Doug sees the perfect way to atone for his sins while giving himself a second chance. Of course this threatens the stability of his gang as his friend James (Renner) begins to resent Doug for wanting to leave and they also end at the mercy of the local kingpin (Postlethwaite).
The Town has all the makings of a movie we've seen countless times, or at least to come from the same place where these movies have come from. There's also an FBI agent, keen on catching the criminals and even a femme fatale, in the shape of Lively's Krista, a woman who had an affair with Doug and is reluctant to see him move on.
It seems that every element and every character in the film are trying to drag Doug down with them and in a way it's fascinating to see how Affleck manages to make us sympathize with this character who is unarguably guilty of several crimes. Yet we find ourselves rooting for him to succeed in his relationship with Claire for example and in the bloody climax we still have an idea of him as some sort of hero.
The film boasts an impressive cast and all of them deliver efficient work. The seriously underrated Hall gives Claire the complexity needed to empathize with her even when she makes strange choices, Hamm is superb, even if nothing is really demanded of him other than to look heroic and use the hell out of his Superman looks and Cooper is fantastic in a single scene.
Renner gives the film's best performance as he creates a character that's as real as he's cinematic. James is one part Method acting, two parts hybrid between James Cagney and Richard Widmark. He's electrifying!
In the biggest setpieces he seems to be fueling the energy from within his body and you can not take your eyes off him even as he commits the most gruesome acts of violence.
It has to be said that Affleck is a master at action sequences, there isn't a single action scene in this movie that feels lacking or unnecessary. They are executed with such precision and stamina that you believe they are recreations of things we might've seen on the news.
If he fails a bit with the most intimate scenes, it only means that he's still finding his niche (there are several red herrings that feel more like plot holes than Hitchcockian techniques) but for all that matters, The Town is nothing if not promising.

Style Sunday.

This week playing "The Doppelgangers Strike a Pose".


Look it's Kate Beckinsale playing Ava Gardner in The Aviator!
Wait a minute...
It's Rebecca Hall at the Venice Film Festival red carpet! A vision out of Golden Age Hollywood, Hall is all kinds of magnificent in a teal design by the house of Vionnet that shows us how to do sexy and classy.
Everything about the look is perfection! The bracelets, the shoes (you can't wear black shoes with anything and she sure knows when they work to accentuate something), the clutch (the color!) and the hair!
Someone get her in a period movie ASAP!


Look it's Carey Mulligan!
No it's not...it's none other than Michelle Williams looking fantastic in a pixie cut and pale, almost nude, color Jason Wu (that resembles the Azzaro Carey wore a few months ago to a Cannes red carpet).

What do you think about these looks?

Sheet-y Saturday.

Where we take a look at posters for upcoming features.


Ben Affleck sure got himself an amazing ensemble for his second directorial effort (Look it's Hall! Look it's Renner! OMG Serena van der Woodsen!) and it makes sense he would want to show them off-hence the weird little squares with their pretty faces on them-but the poster would've been more effective with just that shot of the creepy, masked nuns.


Romain Duris and Vanessa Paradis are beautiful and even if I have no idea what this French film is about, I'm getting a sense of it by the fact that the poster is a sad ripoff of this.

Dying to see any of these movies?

Frost/Nixon **

Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen
Kevin Bacon, Toby Jones, Sam Rockwell, Oliver Platt
Matthew McFadyen, Rebecca Hall

The private lives of public figures have always been a fetish for the masses. The private lives of fallen public figures are practically bliss.
In 1977 when Richard Nixon sat down for his first interview after his resignation, as President of the United States, with, British talk show host, David Frost those who cared saw in it the chance to go behind the scenes of the most controversial President in American history as well as an opportunity to end the speculation and set the record straight, giving Nixon an informal trial.
In an appropriately postmodernist approach, screenwriter Peter Morgan wonders what went on behind the scenes of the interviews and as directed by Ron Howard the result is a vastly entertaining film that fails to become relevant despite its best intentions.
When the film begins, Frost (Sheen) is doing a variety show in Australia and upon watching how popular the last Nixon (Langella) speech was, decides that interviewing the former President will save his career from exile and get him respect as a journalist.
After paying Nixon six hundred thousand dollars and coming up with a team that includes a top television producer (McFadyen) and investigators Bob Zelnick (Platt) and James Reston Jr. (Rockwell), the interview consisting of twelve two hour long sessions takes place.
Nothing in the film is as exciting as watching Langella and Sheen face each other. Both actors deliver breathtaking work as they become the people they're playing (that one mostly knows the actual beings through television gives the film an interesting meta connotation).
Langella is commanding and gives Nixon a dignity he preserves even during moments when he has to deliver cheap, self-analytical lines.
While looking nothing like the President his performance is full of vitality and even charm, Langella makes us believe in his Nixon.
Sheen on the other side proves again what a master of subtlety he can be as he lets the veteran actor take the movie from his hands and fully supports the main performance. He makes out of Frost an ambitious, persevering man with such charisma that you always know he's holding the aces.
Altogether the ensemble does terrific job, Bacon, as Nixon's chief of staff Jack Brennan, gives a moving portrayal of loyalty until the end, while Rockwell's manic energy actually helps make his Reston Jr. come off looking more serious than a conspiracy theorist.
Howard's direction has rarely been this efficient as he creates real tension in events with widely known outcomes. His detailed reconstruction of the interviews and the era is remarkable; he reccurs to aesthetic techniques of the 70's and fashions the film after a docudrama interviewing his own characters. All of this gives the movie a brisk, enjoyable pace that isn't able to get rid of the awkward, insecure discourse behind the people who made it.
Because deep into "Frost/Nixon" you realize that this film isn't exactly a biopic or a mere play adaptation but an actual attempt by Howard (and to some extent Morgan presumedly) to say something about our times.
And this becomes almost crystal clear during a moment when Frost accuses Nixon of invading Cambodia looking for Communists and coming up with nothing.
If you take Communists exchange them for weapons of mass destruction and Cambodia for Irak you have an obvious parallel with the Bush administration and more specifically its inhuman foreign policy.
Once Bush's administration is over hopefully the lesson that will be learned by the world is that history is nothing but a repetitive cycle, "all of this has happened before and it will happen again". And if there has ever been an administration as controversial as the current one it's Nixon's who with Vietnam, Watergate and his subsequent pardon by President Gerald Ford left an entire generation thirsty for justice.
In this way, the plot isn't only premonitory of what will ultimately happen to Bush who like Nixon "devalued the presidency" and "left the country who elected him in trauma" but also fails in justifying its existence.
The questions made by Frost are time appropriate, but the answers become underwhelming as they bring us back to the historical context of the film (there is no other way a reenactment could've gone obviously).
You have to add to this the fact that Howard's view tends to proselitism when from the very start we're made to see Frost and never Nixon as the underdog.
He manages to wash his hands a bit by making Frost a manipulator, "he knows television" says one of the characters and the film often suggests he had dubious qualifications for the job despite his eventual success.
One also has to remember that in a way Frost very well embodies the kind of journalism which we're stuck with nowadays, where attractive, charming people are the ones digesting the news for the audience and delivering them in easy to digest forms.
If the interviews were meant to take place today it's sad to think that someone like Frost would've probably been the only option.
But we never know if Frost is fighting for his credibility, getting back at his critics or if he's actually after the truth.
Not that it matters much because in a way Frost is like the movie itself with the filmmakers using it to make questions they don't know how else to address in the very same way that researchers in the film use the journalist to ventilate their own, more complex inquiries.
But what happens when the film, like Frost can only deliver what they are trained to do? Which is basically to entertain.
You throw them a Ron Howard-ism, which here comes in the shape of an unexpected call the President makes to Frost, where he all but gives away his weak points under the influence of alcohol.
Here the film which has delighted itself in throwing these two men into a cockfight reduces the final interview to an exorcism of class resentment.
Like a "Rocky"-esque match where it also suggests that Frost had the edge merely because he had good timing, "Frost/Nixon" is both its accusation and its absolution.