The Town just opened in Hong Kong and, true to form, the DVD is released in the US next week, which means it’s easily available here now (and from the usual internet sources). It’s the second feature film directed by Ben Affleck. The first was Gone Baby Gone, a not-bad film starring Ben’s brother Casey that was mostly let down by a bad ending. The Town suffers a similar fate.
Affleck stars in this one and has assembled a terrific cast that includes Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Chris Cooper, Pete Postlethwaite, Titus Welliver and, um, Blake Lively. The movie informs us that the Charlestown section of Boston has produced more bank robbers than any other community in the U.S. and then goes on to give us the story of one such group. The tech credits are excellent, as are the action sequences. Renner gives another great performance, Cooper owns the screen during his all-too-brief appearance, Hamm has an odd edge here and Affleck is quite okay. My guess is that here’s someone whose career got off to a great start and then didn’t just taste failure, he practically drowned in it, and has become all the more interesting for it.
I suspect that Affleck used Heat as his model here. The structures of the two films are very similar. But Heat is a far, far better film. The Town probably felt long at its theatrical length of 125 minutes; the DVD director’s cut runs 150 and has lots of fat that could be trimmed. And, without giving anything away, I’ll say that the ending pissed me off, and not in a good way. The critics mostly liked The Town and lets hope that Affleck continues to improve.
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Head remains the sterling example of how to kill a franchise on purpose even though it dates back to a time when the word franchise wasn’t applied to films. The Monkees were sick of their hit TV series by the end of the second season and looking to move on. Meanwhile, the series producer, Bob Rafelson, was looking to direct his first film. The poster for the film didn’t mention the Monkees and it didn’t have their picture – it had a photo of some guy who’s in the film for about 3 seconds. It opened in one theater on a Friday and it was gone by the following Wednesday.
It’s one of 7 films contained in a new boxed set from Criterion called America Lost and Found: The BBS Story, along with Easy Rider, 5 Easy Pieces and Last Picture Show. And somehow, I’d never seen the film until now.
Rafelson co-wrote the screenplay with Jack Nicholson. Apparently they both sat in Harry Dean Stanton’s house, stoned out of their minds, free associating and writing down whatever came to mind. In a 30 minute interview with Rafelson filmed this year, he describes telling Nicholson that he was trying to imagine the blackest thing on the planet and decided it was Victor Mature’s hair. At which point Nicholson announced that the entire film would take place in Mature’s hair. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise when Rafelson says that the film was structured like an LSD trip. The film makes its intentions clear from the start, with the Ditty Diego War Chant “sung” during one of the initial sequences:
Hey hey we are the Monkees
You know we love to please
A manufactured image
With no philosophies
We hope you like our story
Although there isn’t one
That is to say there’s many
That way there is more fun
You told us you like action
And games of many kinds
You like to dance, we like to sing
So let’s all lose our minds!
We know it doesn’t matter,
Cause what you came to see
Is what we’d love to give you,
And give it one, two, three!
But there may come three, two, one, two
Or jump from nine to five,
And when you see the end in sight
The beginning may arrive!
For those who look for meaning,
And form as they do facts,
We might tell you one thing
But we’d only take it back
Not back like in a box back
Not back like in a race,
Not back so we can keep it,
But back in time and space!
You say we’re manufactured,
To that we all agree,
So make you choice and we’ll rejoice
In never being free!
Hey hey we are the Monkees,
We’ve said it all before
The money’s in we’re made of tin
We’re here to give you more!
The money’s in we’re made of tin
We’re here to give you–
The cast, aside from the Monkees, is a bizarre combination of people, described as losers whom they loved for one reason or another. How bizarre? Victor Mature, Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Sonny Liston, Vito Scotti, Percy Helton, Teri Garr, Toni Basile (of Oh Mickey fame), Carol Doda, Tor Johnson – even Rafelson, Nicholson and Dennis Hopper put in very brief appearances.
Rafelson says in the interview that since he thought he’d never get to make another film, he’d better throw everything into this one. So there’s a boxing sequence, a Lawrence of Arabia bit, a western – the kitchen sink might be there and I blinked and missed it.
On one level, this is amazingly influenced by European films of the 60s. It is completely surreal in the way it jumps from one character to the next, one sequence to the next with minimal continuity. But pretensions aside, it’s simply not a very good film, something that Rafelson admits when he says that he always hoped that Head would grow in stature over the years but that never happened and perhaps the film isn’t good.
Basically you need to be a huge Monkees fan to sit through this or just have a tremendous amount of patience for a real cinematic oddball. As for Rafelson, he did get to direct more films – Five Easy Pieces, King of Marvin Gardens, Stay Hungry, Postman Always Rings Twice, so his place in film history is secure.
The Criterion edition packs the usual excellent extras – in this case the 30 minute 2010 interview with Rafelson, a 5 minute TV clip of the Monkees promoting the film in 1968, a documentary on BBS and a commentary done by the Monkees, all of whom are still alive, which I haven’t listened to because that would entail watching the film again, something I don’t feel the need to do for a long, long time.