Gone Baby Gone
director: Ben Affleck
year: 2007
A pair of romantically-involved "Baa-stun" private detectives (Casey Affleck & Michelle Monaghan) test their relationship while tracking child abductions, much to the consternation of a fatherly police chief (Morgan Freeman) and his tough right-hand man (Ed Harris).
Gone Baby Gone is a trashy look at trashy people, directed by a trashy actor and starring his mumbling younger brother. It's set in the working-class neighbourhoods of Boston, although, as critic Armond White rightly points out, no one but the cops actually work. Instead, Affleck puts his Bostonian working-class collection of freaks on display with a perverse glee—in interviews often reminding us that, hey, they're not even actors! The result: gratuitous shot after gratuitous shot of obese bodies, scarred faces, and unrepentant bums adorn the story with what critics call "gritty realism". The irony being, of course, that while castigating the film's deadbeat, coke-addled mother for watching Jerry Springer, Gone Baby Gone wallows in the same filth: extreme melodrama staged by chicken-head eaters and bearded ladies. Much like Springer, it all ends with a serious lesson, too. How dignified.
This Baby doesn't deserve to be found.
3 comments:
I hadn't really noticed before, but I'm curious as to why you use two rating systems on your sister blogs.
I'm not a huge fan of star systems: I added them in because friends and family like them, and they're nice to me, so... But for "Gone Baby Gone", which I like a whole lot more than you (another matter entirely!), this blog gives it a pretty dreadful 25%, whereas on "Compact Cinema" it merits a mediocre but not-quite-as-offputting 40%. Is it all a quite commentary on the absurdity of star systems?!
Do you have different parameters on the different blogs? Sometimes, I'm curious to see what you'd do with a shot-by-shot breakdown of a film you don't like, but I imagine it's a lot harder to drum up enthusiasm for such a project...
I started out with the 5-star system on Compact Cinema (which will be shutting down soon) because I thought it would give a better range than 4 stars. But I was never satisfied with it. I especially had trouble deciding between 4 and 5 stars. Now, I've given the 4-star system a go, and have trouble deciding between 2 and 3. The big reason I use any number of stars is because it forces me to be at least a little concrete. I think I'd be most comfortable using the 1-star system, though!
:)
I'm not sure how I'll do things in 2008, however. I like the short reviews because they're like a film log, but I have a lot more fun with the image-laden posts.
...so there's no grand thought behind the stars. Just experimentation and confusion.
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to you, too.
People often comment to me that they see no connection between the star "rating" and the content of what I write, which leads me to believe I don't take the star part all that seriously (or else that I'm not very good at making up my mind...). I find that writing a paragraph or two is often easier than deciding on a particular number!
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