Out this week is the trailer for The Town, Ben Affleck‘s directorial follow-up to Gone Baby Gone, and it gives good, gritty, blue-collar crime color, character and stakes. Top shelf stuff, this. Well polished, I mean. Not exactly startlingly new, plot-wise, though the melted-face nun get-ups and Rastafarian-Matrix-twins-meets-Ghostrider-skull-masks are a bit unnerving, and could spawn a mini-Halloween trend on particularly Northeastern college campuses. So many films reach in their marketing when they tout “From the studio behind/that brought you…” But the name-dropping here of The Departed by Warner Bros. is actually the rare such associative credit that doesn’t come across as crass and/or empty. That’s the target they’re aiming at, and they seem to have another authentic-ringing product, so they’d be stupid not to bang that drum loudly.
