Gone Baby Gone

I watched Gone Baby Gone with my roommate and her friend on Sunday night. I don't usually watch so many movies but they've just come up.

I really liked this too. Not a blockbuster - it's been said in reviews that it's like Mystic River which I kinda agree especially as they're by the same author Dennis Lehane. Casey Affleck is really good in it as are most of the actors (including Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris) though I thought his work/life partner Michele Monaghan was ehh and was "acting" and reminded me it was movie every time she said a line. Amy Ryan, from my fave TV show "The Wire," does an amazing job playing a distressed mother who's 3 yr old daughter's been kidnapped. I won't say anything more but the movie makes you think. In bed that night, I was still thinking about the themes. Revealing them would be saying too much but it's provoking.

It's set in Boston and as it's Ben Affleck's first directing project, who grew up in Boston, it feels very "this city." I feel drawn to projects that are a close-up glimpse of one life or one moment or one city or one family. Like Once Were Warriors - an awesome intense New Zealand movie about an inner-city struggling family (go Netflix it right now!). I think the best stories and movies and poems are that focused. And in telling that one everyday story, almost nonchalantly, a bigger story is told. About life and love and heroism and wanting more. Like The Fountain actually. I was thinking last night as I was watching it that all the famous love stories in time were about one person loving one other person and doing incredible/sacrifical/romantic things to show that love/win the person/defeat social pressure. In the moment, I bet it doesn't feel like that one story, so personal and individual, will come to be known by generations and repeated and honored, and will represent the bigger issues of mankind. It probably just feels like, "I love you and will do anything to be with you."