LOVELOVELOVELOVELOVE does not even begin to describe how I feel about this flick. This is some EXCELLENT moviemaking, y’all, and I encourage you to get yourself to a theater to see it. Now. Before I buy all the tickets. (I’ve seen it three times already.) It’s my #1 movie for 2010, edging Inception aside. I loved that flick, but I became much more emotionally involved with this one.

I was on the edge of my seat, spellbound, from beginning to end. Great performances, great mood, great settings. So well done. Serious kudos to Ben Affleck on becoming such a great director after such an oddly varied acting career. He also does some great acting in this and he’s totally rocking the Mark Messier skeletor look btw. Jeremy Renner is great; Jon Hamm is great; the gray-haired dude whose name I can never remember even tho he’s on my favorite show Sons of Anarchy is great (this dude); Blake Lively blows the roof off, her performance is a stunner and what a surprise.

Great car chases on one-way cramped up streets in Boston. Great performances by the neighborhood gangster thug florist and his right-arm: the feelings of menace are just so well done here. Hamm’s last line of dialogue: SUCH a great threat. I want to have a reason to use that line. Fun to see so many people from Affleck’s previous directing flick (Gone Baby Gone) popping up again here in very different roles.

SO steeped in its time and its place and its smalltown-in-the-big-city focus. SO many randomly great moments: the nuns getting out of the car and the cop turning his head; the hand on the tattoo when leaving the table; the pictures at the barbecue; the late-night walk to the AA meeting; the “CSI. All the CSIs. Bones.”… I could go on and on.

A heist movie that feels so original and so beyond the constraints of a heist.

I just loved it. Obv. Anyone need someone to go see it with them? 🙂

[p.s. quick DadReaction: pretty well done heist movie, but he hated the ending and thought one thing specifically was just “nope! wouldn’t happen!”]