Mystic River: Worth Your Time?

www.wikipedia.org

First, I want to quickly explain how I'll be choosing the movies I'll watch. Here is the list of the top 250 rated movies on IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/chart/top). Users vote on what they believe to be the top movies, and the ones with the highest ratings make it to this list. Next, I use a random number generator found at http://www.random.org/ to give me a number between 1 & 250. The resulting number corresponds to the movie I will watch for that blog post. The only times when I will use the random number generator more than once are if I cannot find a place to watch the movie, or if I have seen the movie already (and remember enough of it to make it not worthwhile watching again).

So, with that settled, I used the random number generator and got the number 230. That corresponds to Mystic River. Now I hadn't heard much about Mystic River, except that I knew Sean Penn won the Oscar for Best Leading Actor (Tim Robbins also won the role for Best Supporting Actor). The film also stars Kevin Bacon (who went to my highschool!!), Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, and Laura Linney. It was directed by Clint Eastwood, who I absolutely love.

I don't want to spoil too much of the plots in case anyone wants to watch this movie at some point, so I won't go into too much detail. I will say that Mystic River had a lot of similar themes to some more recent films. It's a crime thriller set in Boston that has a bit of a twist at the end (The Departed, Gone Baby Gone, The Town, etc).

I thought this movie was very good. It took a genre that seems overdone now, but was completely original, maybe only because it was an original theme when this movie was made. The acting is great, as evidenced by the Academy Award wins. Something I always pay particular attention to in movies is the music. I think music can really make or break a film, without many people even realizing it. The music can set a backdrop perfectly, or ruin a movie entirely. The movie for Mystic River was good, but not great. That's something that held this movie back from being one of my all time favorites. If it was just a little more haunting, it would have fit the theme perfectly and set this film up to be a masterpiece. As is, the movie was very good, and I recommend it to anyone who thinks crime thrillers are overdone, because this shows what most aspire to be. The only part about it I didn't like was the obviously forced Boston accents, but that could be neglected.

Worth your time.