Friday, September 17, 2010
Oh our God! We're just kinda giddy-stoked about Ben Affleck's Writer/Director/Star turn in The Town. When we dismissed him as a two-bit b-lister and no good as an action/romance/basically anything star, who'd have guessed the solution was to let him write crap and direct it too? Gone, Baby, Gone was amazing and from reports, with the Town, he may have FINALLY made up for Gigli.
May have.
THE TOWN
Ben Affleck directed, co-wrote, and stars in this terrific adaptation of Chuck Hogan’s terrific novel Prince of Thieves. It’s about a small group of bank thieves outside of Boston (Affleck and The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner among them), the FBI agent (Jon Hamm, Mad Men) who goes after them, and the innocent woman (Rebecca Hall) who’s stuck in the middle of it all. Rippling with action and nervous energy, it also happens to be a series of great character studies. (ES) Rated R | SHOWTIMES
DEVIL
What does Satan do in his free time? According to M. Night Shyamalan and Co., he likes hanging out in office elevators — proving once and for all that, yes, smooth jazz is the devil’s music. Anyway, this one time, he trapped five strangers from divergent backgrounds in said elevator, and made them more upset and suspicious than people usually are in elevators. Of course, there’s probably a twist … they were Hitler all along? (TH) Rated PG 13 | SHOWTIMES
ALPHA AND OMEGA
Animated alpha wolf Kate is captured park rangers the day she’s to peace-mate with a rival pack’s leader. She, along with lowly member of the pack Humphrey, is plopped far from her Canadian motherland into Idaho, where they’re supposed to repopulate the area, via (how else?) mating. Meanwhile, there’s danger a’brewin’ back in Canada (mating-related, naturally), and the two must hurry home. Will they triumph? Hopefully. Will they fall in wolf-love? Probably. Is Humphrey’s name a mating pun? Definitely. (TH) Rated G | SHOWTIMES
EASY A
Tired of being harassed at school for his gayness, Brandon beseeches virginal Olive to fake some wild lascivious sex with him at a party. The ruse is successful — post-coital high-fiving attests to that. Olive then has a capitalistic epiphany: Why not pretend-screw socially desperate nerds for profit? Foolproof! She’s then dubbed a trollop, but surprisingly embraces her skanky reputation by seductively licking silverware in public and sporting corsets, all emblazoned with a red “A.” Finally, somebody makes Nathaniel Hawthorne interesting. (TH) PG 13 | SHOWTIMES