Turns out the upcoming Damon-Affleck project will likely be The Trade, the story of two New York Yankees in the seventies who swapped wives. The blogosphere is all atwitter with the notion that we may soon see the Boston duo in pinstripes.
You can thank the crackerjack photoshop staff at the MTV Movie Blog for the image above.
Thanks to Adam, for the heads up on this one.
A post from Universal Hub — a car in the parking lot of local eatery Kelly’s Roast Beef (discussed here on Blog Will Hunting).
But which Kelly’s shall we go to?
A while back the Blog Will Hunting crew payed a visit to the Christopher Lee Playground, the South Boston location in which the GWH boys watch some little league before picking up some burgers (and then getting into some street fights).
The screenplay, as written, is a little different from the scene in the film:
The boys get up and walk down the bleachers.
WILL
I could go for a Whopper.
MORGAN
(nonchalant)
Let’s hit “Kelly’s.”
CHUCKIE
Morgan, I’m not goin’ to “Kelly’s
Roast Beef” just cause you like the
take-out girl. It’s fifteen minutes
out of our way.
MORGAN
What else we gonna do we can’t spare
fifteen minutes?
CHUCKIE
All right Morgan, fine. I’ll tell
you why we’re not going to “Kelly’s.”
It’s because the take-out bitch is a
fuckin’ idiot. I’m sorry you like
her but she’s dumb as a post and she
has never got our order right, never
once.
MORGAN
She’s not stupid.
WILL
She’s sharp as a marble.
CHUCKIE
We’re not goin’.
(beat)
I don’t even like “Kelly’s.”
The next scene shows them in Chuckie’s car — with Kelly’s Roast Beef bags, of course. As you will recall, in the film the exchange doesn’t have Chuckie dissing Kelly’s this way… it’s a bit of a surprise to see such anti-Kelly’s sentiment on the page, as the local chain is regarded as something of an institution. (As we noted a couple weeks ago, guest star Julianne Moore namechecks Kelly’s in a recent episode of 30 Rock — “Let’s go to Kelly’s! Let’s get some roast beef!”).
Founded in 1951, Kelly’s lays claim to the invention of the Original Roast Beef Sandwich — “before 1951, no one had ever heard of eating such a creation!“ Their original location is their beachfront outpost in Revere, and over the years four other locations have sprung up around Boston. One is inside a Jordan’s Furniture. (Also in that Jordan’s Furniture: an IMAX theater. I’m pretty sure I saw The Dark Knight there. At that furniture store. It’s weird, I know.)
Celebrating six decades of quality, customer service, and value, Kelly’s is still a family owned and operated business that continues the original philosophy of our founders. Many of Kelly’s hourly employees and managers have been with the company over thirty years! Kelly’s is open 363 days a year, providing our valued customers with the quality and consistent standards they have come to expect over the years. Now when people ask, “Why is Kelly’s So Famous Anyhow?” Our answer remains: because of our loyal customers.
They of course also mention Good Will Hunting as one of their many claims to fame.
Their marketing plays up their sense of tradition and customer service, and though Chuckie would have found some allies in his discontent on the Yelp customer review message boards, most Yelpers have positive things to say about the staff, and especially the food, often using the word “fried” as an adjective of deeply satisfied approval. The reviews tend to prefer the flagship restaurant at Revere Beach, despite the seagulls’ attempts at food theft, and perhaps indicative of nothing, at least one reviewer at another location admits to being drunk during his visit.
So on the day of our visit to Southie, we left the Christopher Lee playground wondering, which Kelly’s did they go to?
It essentially comes down to the flagship Revere location and the one in Medford.
We know that is that it is 15 minutes out of their way… according to Google maps (assuming they were coming back to Southie afterwards) it would take 37 minutes to drive to Revere Beach and back, but only 25 to get to Medford. Also, the Medford location has a drive-thru, and Chuckie’s comment as they squabble in the car on the return trip — “I know what you ordered, I was there” — suggests they did the drive-thru and Chuck did the ordering (and the paying).
So we drove by the Medford location, and… well… it looked pretty boring….
Despite the fact that is probably the one they went to (CORRECTION: This has been disproved, thanks to Patrick and Josh. Check out the comments) … we wanted to go to the beach.
So on that summer day we had a wonderful meal — open air seating, a sea breeze, seagulls, Bostonians, and more than once, someone would sing out, “Chuck I had a double burger!”
Tired of hearing about the iPad? Everyone loves it! Everyone has a complaint about it!
Among the over-hyped complaints about the revolutionary new Apple device is that certain accents and regional pronunciations make the terms “iPod” and “iPad” indistinguishable.
Cult of Mac blogger John Brownlee writes:
I wanted to point out quickly why I think this is such a terrible product name. I’m from Boston originally. We have an interesting way of pronouncing our a’s.
Call up a friend with a Boston accent and ask them to say “iPad.” They might just pronounce it pretty similarly to “iPod.” We’re weird that way. Or as Jake von Slatt just said to me: “Here in Boston, we’d say ‘Do you haave the big iPohd or the little iPohd?’”
Even if the pronunciation is different for everyone, though, iPad still seems a bad choice. A one letter difference makes for a lot of possible confusion.
The following send-up of the product uses good ole Good Will Hunting to elucidate this point. (And at last, someone jokes about the iPad and steers clear of feminine hygiene.)
Enjoy.
Seeing Boston on film or tv is like watching the Red Sox play well — it’s not actually that unusual, but it’s always a pleasant surprise. So I was thrilled to see tv’s 30 Rock come to Boston last week.
Much has been made of guest star Julianne Moore’s “thick,” “terrible,” “atrocious,” “ridiculously broad,” “worst-attempt-ever” Boston accent, but I kind of love every minute of it. (As one commenter on Universal Hub states, at least she nails the attitude.)
I overheard someone at a conference last weekend small-talking about the 30 Rock episode with another conference-goer. “We don’t all talk like that, you know,” she said. I suppose she probably actually grew up in/around Boston, in which case maybe there’s a little more reason to take it personally… but 30 Rock historically hasn’t shied away from playing up broad stereotypes for laughs (in repeated parodies of gays, southerners, Canadians, i-bankers, etc). And while no Bostonian I know “talks like that,” the thrill of recognition is there.
When I moved from Michigan to a Boston suburb at age eight, kids really did use the modifier “wicked” all the time; it was totally weird. And I could never non-self-consciously say the word “aunt” in this new environment — I didn’t want to call attention to myself saying it the normal way (“ant”), but felt weird saying it the Massachusetts way (“ahnt”). So I would just refer to my “mom’s sister” a lot.
So I encountered some of the regionalisms as a kid, but honestly, I have heard much more of the “Boston accent” on screen than in any actual experience living around here. Fortunately there’s more to the Julianne Moore’s Boston “authenticity” than the accent. She and Alec Baldwin wander into a tv news studio in this latest episode, and Moore’s character eagerly sits at the news desk, announcing “I feel like Chet Curtis and Natalie Jacobson!”
The duo (“Chet and Nat”) hosted ABC’s local news for 20-something years, including the period of my childhood in which I lived in Acton, Massachusetts. I remember their names well, above all other local news anchors to whom I’ve been an been audience (except for rival Channel 7′s R.D. Sahl, who visited my fifth grade class — I have his autograph.)
Probably unlike most who recall Curtis and Jacobson well, I hadn’t realized ”Chet and Nat” were also married for most of the time they ancored the news together, and their news partnership ended alongside their marriage, in a very public divorce. This detail adds a perhaps unintended layer to Moore’s character, who is in the midst of a pending divorce herself, which had also lasted 20-something years.
The second most satisfying Boston reference in the episode has to be Moore’s hysterical mention of Kelly’s Roast Beef.
Kelly’s is an historic (well, founded 1951) local roast beef chain outlet — but, more on Kelly’s next time.
Until then, enjoy this 30 Rock “web exclusive” of Grizz and Dotcom making their “own urban stories, just like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.”
A good reference is a wonderful thing, and somehow the Good Will Hunting guys have become the definitive urban Boston duo, even more so than Chet Curtis and Natalie Jacobson.
While browsing at my favorite local bookstore, I flipped through Barbara Lynch’s new cookbook Stir. Check out this choice bit of jacket copy:
Lynch’s cuisine is all the more remarkable because it is self-taught. In a story straight out of Good Will Hunting, she grew up in the turbulent projects of “Southie”, where petty crime was the only viable way to make a living…. Through a mix of hunger for knowledge, hard work, and raw smarts, she gradually created her own distinctive style of cooking….
The publisher has betrayed a fundamentally flawed—and, I think, commonly held—understanding of Good Will Hunting. True, Barbara Lynch and Will Hunting are both from Southie (notice the publisher’s timid quotation marks). But while Lynch’s rise to fame from unlikely roots as a result of her “hunger for knowledge, hard work, and raw smarts” is admirable, it is hardly the same as Will Hunting’s story.
Will Hunting does not work hard. Will’s remarkable gifts are unearned; as he puts it, he could “always just play.” At the beginning of the movie, Will is an under-employed genius with little more than (presumably) a high school diploma. At the end of the movie, he is an unemployed genius who has turned down multiple job offers and rejected academia to “see about a girl.”
Good Will Hunting is not the story of an underdog going up against the establishment and, against all odds, making good. That’s Finding Forrester, a much less satisfying film. Good Will Hunting is the story of a lonely orphan boy who learns to love and be loved. Will’s remarkable abilities are nothing more than a plot device.
But I don’t think that story will help sell cookbooks.
Rachel Maddow and MSNBC covered the much ballyhooed election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts on Tuesday night, and as seems to be true of all news segments regarding Massachusetts these days, did so from a bar. (Governor Deval Patrick appeared from a bar a few days prior to discuss the upcoming election.) Jon Stewart had something to say about it on Wednesday night’s Daily Show.
Have a listen via the audio clip above, or watch it here.
