Monument Ave.

Lance: I've got to be honest, I'm a little wary of all these Irish mob movies. I mean, how many different takes can there be on the Irish mob? It's kind of like a mad lib. Guy grows up in [Eastie, Southie, Charlestown]. He or one of his family members is a [car thief, enforcer, gun runner]. Someone [rats on the boss, kills a family member, sells out to a rival gang]. This pisses off the boss, so he sends his thugs to [break the guy's legs, shoot him, drive him around town and intimidate him into silence]. Something goes wrong, and the [Boston Police, State Police, FBI] start snooping around. Etc. etc. etc.

Well, Monument Ave. has all of those, but it's more about life for the Townies in Charlestown than it is about the murder mystery. Denis Leary plays Bobby O'Grady, a low-level car thief in an Irish gang who is deeply conflicted when his boyhood friend and then his cousin Seamus get knocked off by the boss because they are accused of being snitches. The Charlestown way is to keep your mouth shut and look the other way (and there is truth to that, the neighborhood is well known for it's unsolved murders). But can Bobby O'Grady do that one more time? We get lots of close-ups of Denis Leary's mug as he tries to work that out.

Scott: This was an interesting movie. As you said, it's not really about mundane things like "plot" but more about what it's like for the characters to try and live in this environment. With that in mind, it was actually pretty good. If you're expecting a twisty thriller like The Departed, then you're going to be disappointed, but if you're just trying to locate a Denis Leary film that isn't disappointingly bad, then you're in luck. We did have some trepidation that the love interest would fall into the Carey Treatment trap of being totally superfluous, but since there's no real plot anyway, that's not a big deal. I'd also say that just by existing she turns up the tension between Leary and his rival, the local mob boss played by Colm Meaney (who, by the way, is great, but also in this film was the only person who had a suspect accent, which was a big surprise to me).

Lance: This movie wasn't at all disappointingly bad; it also wasn't at all popular. Looking at the box office numbers as reported on IMDB it lost so much money that I'm expecting a handwritten note from Leary thanking me for renting it. Just five million more rentals until he starts seeing residuals.

Oh, and congratulations on referencing The Carey Treatment again. I believe you do so in every review. Since we're referencing previous movies on the list, I'll take this opportunity to note that Monument Ave. also played a role in Mystery Street, as the wrongly accused suspect and his wife lived on Monument Ave.

One last note/question from me. There is a scene where the crew from Charlestown comes across a black man walking down the street and kidnaps him briefly in a successful attempt to intimidate him into leaving. In it, the O'Grady character showers the victim with all sort of racial epithets, including one that I don't think I'd ever heard until a Boston cop used it in reference to Henry Louis Gates. Is that just a Boston thing? Do you think this scene was even important? I'm not sure what it is supposed to say about Charlestown.

Scott: That was an interesting scene in that the character who was going nuts with the racial slurs and pointing a gun to the African-American guy's head was apparently doing it in an attempt to make the other guys in his posse realize how stupid their racism was. I think from a character point, it was mainly to expand upon the idea that O'Grady has outgrown Charlestown but doesn't seem to be able to find a way out of it. It comes right on the heels of the scene where he's trying to chat up the yuppie woman and instead gets completely undermined by all his townie connections butting in and ruining things for him. This scene is more of the same: he's sort of moved beyond this knee-jerk us vs. them mindset, but everyone around him is so stuck in it that they don't even realize what they're really saying or doing. In that sense I didn't have an issue with the scene even though on the surface it was pretty jarring.

Next Stop Wonderland

Lance: When I was in high school, we had an assembly speaker one day who gave a speech on I can't remember what (OK, there were a lot of assemblies like that). But what I do remember about this particular speech is that it really wasn't a speech at all. It was a 20-minute prelude to nothing. The speaker kept predicating his statements with "what I want to talk about today..." and "before I get into my topic..." and otherwise suggesting that there was something to look forward to, and then the talk was done. That's essentially what Next Stop Wonderland is: 90 minutes of suggesting that the movie is going somewhere, an end scene, and five minutes of credits.

Scott: Yeah, pretty much. In other words, it's like most of our blog entries. Drumroll! You know, I could kind of see what they were going after here. The male and female leads each go through a series of experience and romances and we the viewer keep expecting them to get together, but instead they end up getting together with other people, and doing other things, and just missing each other several times -- almost connecting without actually connecting. The woman basically speaks the premise of the film when she tells a story about how her parents never would have met if not for a random bit of chance, and then gets rebuffed by someone who says that is obviously the hand of fate. We see these people almost meet but not quite meet and then, right at the end, they finally accidentally meet and you're supposed to ask, is this random luck, or is it fate that they finally did get together after these near misses? Of course, what we actually end up asking is, who gives a crap? Also, why not use Philip Seymour Hoffman more? After all, that dude has an Oscar.

Lance: That's a pretty good synopsis from someone who derided the movie before it began as a "Rom Com." (And if you ever use the term Rom Com again you will be beaten.) Of course, it turned out that the film was more com than rom, not that it was that funny. But there were a couple of funny parts. I liked the montage of potential suitors calling to respond to the personal ad the heroine's mother placed on her behalf. That was about it for me. A huge part of the plot surrounds some small time mobster trying to kill a balloon fish at the New England Aquarium. That was supposed to be funny; I thought it was a waste. The male lead (Alan Gelfant) was pretty bland, too, for what that's worth.

And they did use Philip Seymour Hoffman plenty, it's just that the scene that had the potential to be the funniest in the movie--one where Hope Davis's character finally watches a break-up video that Hoffman gave her when he moved out--is cut short because her answering machine goes on the fritz and she ends up fighting with it while Hoffman's video plays in the background.

And I really thought the movie did a poor job of being a "Boston movie." It's like they were trying way way too hard, to the point that the Boston in the movie was more cliche than real. Every time anyone goes out to a bar, they get a Sam Adams. Every character, every bar. We get it, Sam Adams is a Boston beer. But it's use is not compulsory. And a gay male nurse (now there is a shocking break from stereotype...funny how every male nurse in movies is gay, but all the male nurses I know are not) meets his partner on a duck boat tour. Psst, Mr. Director...no one who actually lives in Boston rides the duck boats. Had the movie been made after 2003, I'm sure all of the bar patrons would have put down their Sam Adams, locked arms, and sang "Sweet Caroline" when the Sox game on the TV went to commercial because that's what we supposedly do.

Scott: I do have to say that I have been on a duck boat tour. I don't actually live in Boston, so maybe I don't count, something that is at least true according to local media. I agree with you in terms of how they tried to make it overtly Boston for the national people who otherwise, we can assume, would just give the film blank stares (oh wait, we were doing that anyway. But for a totally different reason). I did like that they used some different Boston locations than the other films we've seen, even if those locations were mainly used for stupid purposes (see: aquarium). I also sort of disagree with you about the male lead, because he seemed like a guy that would actually be a plumber on the North Shore, which I think means the acting was pretty good rather than that he was just a douchey townie. I thought he was much more Boston than the female lead.

But you're right about that gay nurse subplot. That whole thing was done in a very 1990's way that I'm sure seemed subtle at the time but now, post marriage law, seems really After School Special. And the fact that this film not only the female lead be a nurse but also have the male lead get caught up in an Irish mob plot was way too much in terms of Boston cliches. Jeez, Hollywood, we get it -- Boston has a lot of hospitals and Irish mobsters. You don't have to have every single film revolve around that stuff. It's pretty bad when those are the only occupations, even for people in a Rom Com.

Lance: Mickey, Seamus, and Knuckles will be by to break your legs shortly.

Tags: Hope Davis Alan Gelfant Brad Anderson Next Stop Wonderland 1998