Love that Dirty Water
Oct. 10th, 2010 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ariadnes_stringHey, some of you out there are from Boston/ the Boston area, aren't you? Have you seen Ben Affleck's The Town?
I saw it this afternoon, and totally recommend it, even if it does depict a Boston--violent, insanely insular, deliberately thickheaded-- that only a Bostonian could love/feel nostalgic for (and most will tell you that it's that kind of shit that made them leave).
I went with a friend who grew up in Queens, and she was completely baffled and fascinated by the neighborhood dynamics it depicts because apparently, even in New York, there weren't neighborhoods so sharply divided not just along racial lines but along ethnic and class lines.
I mean, like Affleck himself, I'm white, middle-class and from Cambridge (we went to the same high school), and when I lived in Cambridge I never even considered, setting foot in the Charlestown, South Boston or Dorchester--any more than you would set foot in a black neighborhood like Roxboro in those (even more) racially troubled times. You just didn't--or you'd get bottles tossed at you, the way a character in the movie does. Now, I haven't lived in Boston for a long time, and I gather that now upscale condos are going up in Southie, but the movie seems to be set in the present, and not much seems to have changed....
But--hometown boy makes good and everything--Affleck does a great job. He has an amazing cast, including Jeremy Renner, the guy from the Hurt Locker, using his crazy powers of intensity for evil here, Titus Welliver, Chris Cooper, Peter Postlethwaite, Rebecca Hall. The only wrong note is Jon Hamm, who I love to death in Mad Men, but here seems ridiculously un-gritty--carefully enunciating his "fucks" and all. Advertising yes; law enforcement, no.
And Affleck himself has sure aged well. And turned into an excellent director.
So consider this a rec, even if you have no interest in Boston, which the movie makes out to be at least as exotic and incomprehensible as Iraq did in the last movie I saw starring Renner. Which it probably is, and always was.
I saw it this afternoon, and totally recommend it, even if it does depict a Boston--violent, insanely insular, deliberately thickheaded-- that only a Bostonian could love/feel nostalgic for (and most will tell you that it's that kind of shit that made them leave).
I went with a friend who grew up in Queens, and she was completely baffled and fascinated by the neighborhood dynamics it depicts because apparently, even in New York, there weren't neighborhoods so sharply divided not just along racial lines but along ethnic and class lines.
I mean, like Affleck himself, I'm white, middle-class and from Cambridge (we went to the same high school), and when I lived in Cambridge I never even considered, setting foot in the Charlestown, South Boston or Dorchester--any more than you would set foot in a black neighborhood like Roxboro in those (even more) racially troubled times. You just didn't--or you'd get bottles tossed at you, the way a character in the movie does. Now, I haven't lived in Boston for a long time, and I gather that now upscale condos are going up in Southie, but the movie seems to be set in the present, and not much seems to have changed....
But--hometown boy makes good and everything--Affleck does a great job. He has an amazing cast, including Jeremy Renner, the guy from the Hurt Locker, using his crazy powers of intensity for evil here, Titus Welliver, Chris Cooper, Peter Postlethwaite, Rebecca Hall. The only wrong note is Jon Hamm, who I love to death in Mad Men, but here seems ridiculously un-gritty--carefully enunciating his "fucks" and all. Advertising yes; law enforcement, no.
And Affleck himself has sure aged well. And turned into an excellent director.
So consider this a rec, even if you have no interest in Boston, which the movie makes out to be at least as exotic and incomprehensible as Iraq did in the last movie I saw starring Renner. Which it probably is, and always was.
