Ben Affleck as a committee-chairing congressman from Pennsylvania's 7th district. Check.
Ben Affleck as a committee-chairing congressman from Pennsylvania's 7th district. Check.
Ben Affleck as a committee-chairing congressman from Pennsylvania's 7th district. Check.
And yet it works! Well, that part doesn't. Ben Affleck is supposed to be powerful, authoritative, suave, and old enough to be Russell Crowe's former roommate. I guess he's suave.
Going through all the ins and outs of this would be too painful for me at this late hour. Suffice it to say the movie is good. It's what 24 is dying to be. It has excellent pacing, and it appropriately balances, in truly nonstandard Hollywood fashion, both entertainment and realism. Not realism realism. Just realism is the sense that maybe on someone's worst day ever this situation could possibly have a chance of happening. It's not like Ben Affleck is somersaulting off of the Capitol and karate-chopping Russell Crowe right as he's about to deliver his article for A1 the next day. I can at least say that much.
Russell Crowe is restrained and delivers. Rachel McAdams is hot, as always, and she adds some nice quirkiness to the mix (although the writers make sure not to have her go over-the-top into some sort of Lethal Weapon reincarnation, journo-style). Helen Mirren is overwrought, but still hilarious (deliberately). Ben Affleck is terrible, but still hilarious (inadvertently).
Early in the film, Russell Crowe (old-time newsroom shoeleather duder) voices his displeasure, numerous times, at the rise of the "new kids in town," a.k.a. bloggers, who are represented by Rachel McAdams. "Watergate wasn't broken open on a blog!" -- Stuff like that. Totally lame, but nevertheless an interesting plot device. (Naturally, McAdams finds her bearings as a professional reporter and eventually nabs the byline on "the story.") However, it was made even more lame by the fact that every single person in the theater other than me was over 90 years old. It's like this film was reviewed in The Daily Nursing Home and portrayed as some sort of revenge against technology, or a Luddite's dream or something of the sort. So all of these geriatrics got tons of laughs in. And then they rolled on home to catch "Amos 'n' Andy" reruns using their prized antique 1956 transistor radios.
In the end -- bien. Not much more I could've asked for. I'll also second A.O. Scott's heads-up that the credits are a must-see, albeit redundant if you've ever taken a tour of the New York Times building.
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P.S. As for the previews, I was fairly impressed. Apatow has a new film called Funny People, and it's starring the whole lot of J.A. regulars, but it also features Eric Bana, Adam Sandler, and Jason Schwartzman. It looks very sappy, but that's predictable. Some of the jokes look great. Yet it is Public Enemies, a Michael Mann film about Depression-era criminals such as John Dillinger, and starring Christian Bale, Johnny Depp, and Billy Crudup, which looks fucking ridiculous. Johnny Depp is god. (Channing Tatum isn't, but whatever.)
Also, there's some movie where Abigail Breslin has a sister who has cancer so she offers to give up her kidney to help, and eventually her mom, Cameron Diaz, ends up shaving her head. Or something.
