gone baby gone

so it started out a bit slow.... it's one of those movies that opens with all these local shots of people sitting out on their porches and steps. not uninteresting, but not mindblowing either.

what's always interesting though is seeing the sides of a city you've never seen and may never get to see. those people and those relationships formed in what the movies make out to be the seedy underbelly. the poor areas that middle- and upper-class america don't have a clue about. (not that i do either, but at least i can say i grew up in the projects of new york -- and survived.)

gone baby gone is set in the seedy underbelly of baw-ston -- lots of think baw-ston accents, white trash outfits, and tough guy attitudes. at first i thought it was a bit overdone, but if i've never been exposed to it, who am i to say?

in any case, i thought the characters were fairly unreadable for most of the movie. except for casey affleck and his girlfriend, the rest of the cast was fairly emotionless. as i believe they were meant to be. this made for some great twists at the end, though i must admit i got a bit of whiplash.

at first, i thought the movie was going to end after 30 minutes. and then all of a sudden it was going again. and that's kind of how it went the rest of the time. you think it's over. but then it's not. it made for a bit of a choppy ride. as i heard someone say on their way out, the pacing wasn't the best. perhaps it's a reflection of how life is. or perhaps it was a reflection of how the director had no idea what he was doing. who knows for sure?

i'm not sure how this film was labelled -- action? drama? suspense? thriller? i'm not even sure if it knew what it wanted to be. it seemed to be a little of this, a little of that. in the end, i'm wondering if it just wanted to make some commentary on life.

that sometimes there's no right or wrong choice. but that every choice has its repercussions. and you can choose based on what you know to be right. but not everyone is going to have the same notions you have about rightness. i know that's a bit wordy, but it totally sums up the movie.

for those of you in the LA area, you must check out the $2 movies at UCLA. while the free sneaks aren't open to the public, the $2 movies totally are!

so join in the fun: http://students.asucla.ucla.edu/cec/films.php