Posted on: February 16, 2008 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0

Gone Baby Gone / 2008 Miramax / 114 Minutes / http://videos.movies.go.com/gonebabygone /

By this time, Gone Baby Gone has achieved a number of accolades. For be it for Miramax to stop this momentum, so they have went forth and made this one fo the first DVDs (and Blu-Ray discs) that are a “must buy” for 2008. For those individuals that might have missed this Ben Affleck-directed movie when it was first out in theatres, Gone Baby Gone is a movie that takes place in Boston. The movie starts off with the search for Amanda, a missing child, and an ever-unwinding tale of thievery, drugs, and intrigue follows. The child dies after a screwed-up exchange for drug money that Amanda’s mother had stolen, and the focus is shifted to the trial and tribulations of another young child, this time a boy. The movie itself is star-studded; Ben’s brother Casey takes on the main role of Patrick Kenzie, while Morgan Freeman plays Captain Jack Doyle and Ed Harris rounds out the cast as Detective Remy Bressant.

Individuals are given a better sense of the making of the movie due to the DVD’s tremendous amount of bonus features. This means that individuals can bypass the movie for the time being and watch one of the two featurettes that explains in greater detail the motivations and constraints that ultimately formed the movie into what it ultimately became. The insight is only furthered when one switches on the commentary track, which features Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard (another writer of the film). Where most commentary tracks tend to focus on specific parts of scenes or a limited section of what is happening, the commentary track for “Gone Baby Gone” goes beyond that and sets up the movie in terms of real life happenings, influential characters in both Affleck’s and Stockard’s lives.

This ultimately does much more of a job in providing a context for the movie than the vast majority of movie commentaries do. Gone Baby Gone marks the first film directed by Ben Affleck, and its commercial as well as critical successes should be enough of a carrot with which to bring Affleck back into the directors’ chair for years to come. Gone Baby Gone’s story is intricate, full of twists and turns, and will provide individuals with something that they will need to decompress and digest. It will only be after repeated viewings that the true beauty of the film will show.

Rating: 7.5/10

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