This Week's Home Viewings

Major spoilers for The Town start immediately. Lawyer's review is here.

The Town works well the majority of the running time but drops the ball big-time during the closing 20 minutes - where smart crooks (like Pete Postlethwaite) make dumb mistakes and smarter cops (including John Hamm) make even dumber mistakes. All of it forced to get to a pre-ordained unsatisfying conclusion rather than naturally and logically following the progression of the story and the characters. For all of its homages to Heat, it should have used one more and allowed Hamm to take Ben Affleck out . . .

When Val Kilmer is turned away by Ashley Judd in Heat, you can feel the weight of their marriage. When Rebecca Hall turns away Ben Affleck, it's done clumsily. First, the cops would stay away from the windows. Second, they would have picked up on the code words "sunny days" right away. The incredulous relationship just started and he's responsible for one of the worst days of her life - I didn't buy the couple for one second despite the good acting.

And why go all Andy Dufresne by leaving some buried money behind? This makes Hall an accomplice. In contrast, the great thing about Amy Brenneman in Heat is her purity and how it changes Robert De Niro. After killing a bunch of cops, are we really supposed to sympathize with Affleck just because his junkie mother killed herself?

The frustrating thing is that the first 90 minutes is the best crime drama in a long while which evokes an incredible sense of location. The acting is frequently superb and Affleck's direction creates terrific tension and suspense. B

Life's too short and hard not to enjoy films like The Other Guys. Since I like even lesser Will Ferrell outings like this and this, it shouldn't surprise that this one goes in my win column. I laughed a lot, frequently out loud - the biggest one being Rob Riggle talking about his weekend at a bar mitzvah. But the improvisations by Ferrell are genius and as Lawyer pointed out, there's just enough craft here (specifically the bar scene) to warrant a B+.

A second look at The Social Network confirms its status as my favorite film since 2007. Each scene is rich with humor, intelligence, and skill. Even scenes that seemed out of place initially worked better - most notably the Winkelvi's conversation with Harvard's president. This scene brilliantly shows the twins on the butt-end of the social hierarchy they rule everywhere else. Their losing of the rowing competition is a changing of the guard - the old hierarchy is about to be flattened by Zuckerberg's website.

Those comparing Zuckerberg to Ben Stiller's Greenberg are way off base. Zuckerberg is not sympathetic, but he's smart and witty and one of the hardest-working students at Harvard. Greenberg is a lazy, pathetic, whiny douche loser who bitches to the airlines about trivial events. In a film about connecting through computers and the loss of actual friendships and human touch, a touchy-feely main character wouldn't be genuine. A

The Town - B
The Other Guys - B+
The Social Network - A