Moral Abstraction

gonebabygone.jpgRoughly halfway into Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, the movie is finished. The plot involving a kidnapped youth has been apparently, tragically resolved. But the movie still has an hour left, a clockwatcher will tell you. And even if you’re not a person regularly calculating how the anticipated remaining X plot will unfold in the remaining Y minutes, you know that there’s plenty left to come.

Built for Bad Movies

The oft-stated (and obviously fallacious) stakes are that Miramax needs Project Greenlight movies to be financial successes for the studio to continue bankrolling the enterprise. The unstated reality is that Greenlight will never produce a decent movie until it drastically changes the way it operates.