By happenstance, I watched in succession a group of recent films whose Metacritic ratings all fell in the mid- to high-70s, but of which I had decidedly different opinions, here listed from most favorable to least.
From The Town (2010, MC-74), I get the feeling that Ben Affleck looked at the efforts of elders Eastwood, Scorsese, Lumet, and others -- to penetrate the seamy side of his native Boston -- and said, “Hey, I’ll show you what we’re all about.” Of course he’d already done that in his first directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone, but I was surprised to find myself won over by this expression of the Beantown crime formula. I don’t usually go for car chases, but I found one such through the narrow streets of the North End to be hilarious. Likewise with extended shootouts between cops and robbers, but it’s kind of cute to see one such set in Fenway Park. The town of the title is Charlestown, a square mile that has in fact produced an amazing number of bank and armored car robbers, and while my knowledge of Boston’s ethnic enclaves is not comprehensive, I found the flavor of this relatively authentic, within its genre limits. Affleck himself is the leader of one gang, with childhood friend Jeremy Renner as his triggerman. In the course of one bank heist, they take manager Rebecca Hall hostage, but then release her blindfolded, only to find out she’s a “toonie” – as opposed to “townie” – in their own neighborhood. Ben tries to check out whether she could have recognized the masked robbers, and soon is falling for her (not a stretch of the imagination with the lovely Ms. Hall). Don Draper, aka Jon Hamm, leads the FBI investigation, while other welcome faces turn up, such as Chris Cooper for a scene or two as Affleck’s imprisoned father. Not a cinematic gem, this proved to be an entertaining genre exercise with strong local flavor.
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010, MC-79) was reviewed as a documentary to see even if you have no appreciation of the subject. I don’t, and I did -- but I don’t necessarily advice you to do the same, even if Anne Sundberg and Ricki Stern do look beyond showbiz cliché in their portrait of a driven performer’s drive to perform, even well past her sell-by date. Though I was never able to see behind Rivers’ absurdly nipped-tucked-&-botoxed face to a more sympathetic character behind the mask, one does derive some sense of a will, a way, and a world. But if you want to spend time in the company of a tough New York Jewish comedienne and provocateur, you’d be better off with Fran Lebovits and Public Speaking.
Soul Kitchen (2010, MC-76) offers just what you expect from Germany – frothy romantic comedy and food porn. Now I do indeed have great expectations of director Fatih Akin, but this would-be jeu d’esprit is a far cry from Head-On and Edge of Heaven. I’m inclined to let him have his fun, but I certainly did not join in, and wound up fast-forwarding through the second half. This film takes his usual inside look at his hometown of Hamburg but does not balance it off with trips to his ancestral Turkey, as his other films do so memorably. This caper follows a hapless restaurateur trying to appeal to a hip young crowd in a converted factory, while dealing with his journalist girlfriend going off to Shanghai and his ne’er-do-well brother getting out of jail and depending on him for work, along with a madman chef and a yuppie old classmate scheming to buy him out. This film certainly expresses youthful energy, but for me the romance was vacant and the comedy landed with a dull thud.
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