Boardwalk Empire/The Town

No spoilers here, just some pretty general comments.

Boardwalk Empire - Like Treme, it brings together a dream team of filmmakers, yet is less than the sum of its parts. Buscemi is great, the writing is taut, and it looks as beautiful as any movie, let alone any TV show. The characters aren't all that defined, and the lead actor is weak. Worth watching, but it's not all that engaging. But then, Omar was only onscreen for about ten seconds.

The Town - Understand something: Heat is the best heist film ever made. So when a filmmaker pays tribute to Michael Mann, as Christopher Nolan did with The Dark Knight, I'm on board. Affleck heads another all-star cast, and the result is a very good, well-pitched movie. If I sound a bit low-key in my praise, it's not because the movie isn't amazing, only that the book, by Chuck Hogan, was better. Normally when you hear that phrase "the book was better" you have to take it with a grain of salt, because they are two very different mediums, and what people expect from book adaptations borders on the impossible. What's weird about The Town is that it's less Heat-like than the novel. Hogan's book has an almost perfect pace to it with regards to the actual heists. You get a feeling for why McRay (the Affleck character) is such a great thief; his patience and diligence shines, just the way Neil McCauley's does in Heat. In the movie, everything happens so much quicker, and the robberies (which are certainly not lacking intensity and ingenuity) seem more the result of brute force rather than planning and efficiency.

I blame the editing. Movies today just seem to need an extra ten or fifteen minutes to establish a more leisurely feel before ramping up the emotional levels. In the book there is a bit of downtime between robberies, which establishes the characters and their relationships. In the movie everything happens at a rapid pace, which, again, does not make the film less watchable, but denies the viewer the chance to connect with the characters in a more mundane situation.

The book also had one setpiece that I really missed. In the book, the second robbery is of a movie theatre. McRay cases the theatre looking for a big opening weekend, sees the audience reaction to the flying cow trailer for Twister (the book is set in '96) and makes his decision. During the actual robbery, Jem (the Jeremy Renner character) has a shootout with the cardboard cutouts in the theatre lobby, petrifying their hostages by yelling out the catchphrases of movie stars while demolishing cutouts from their awful '96 movies. Meaning, Jem yells "Yippie Kai-yay Motherfucker" and shoots down a Bruce Willis cutout from Last Man Standing, and "Ain't Gonna Be No Rematch" while shooting up Stallone from Daylight. It was funny and edgy and would have played well on film. But the movie is set in present day, so they just knock over an armored car. Not that there's anything wrong with knocking over an armored car. It's a great scene and leads to a great chase.

Anyway, it's still my pick for best movie of the year. Affleck was terrific, Renner was even more terrific, Rebecca Hall was amazing and vulnerable and sexy, and there were spooky cameos from Chris Cooper and Pete Postelwaite.

And it has Mad Man.