Just a quick post today, to commemorate what is surely the best moment in Ben Affleck’s The Town…
John Hamm steals the show with his Bostonese – listen to the moment here.
Hmm, and what does that film still remind me of…?
A Box o’ Quarters
Written by Alex on October 8th, 2010
Getting Out of (the) Town
Written by Alex on September 28th, 2010“Will, why’d you come all the way out here?” Skylar exclaimed.
“I wanted to see you. I wanted fate to take control. I let my heart lead me. You were right. I don’t hate you Skylar, I love you. Would you forgive me? Would you please forgive me? Without you, I don’t feel complete.” Will explained.
“Will, of course I forgive you.” Skylar kissed him again smiling.
“Can I come in?” Will asked. Skylar nodded.
“Come on in!” Skylar pulled away from him and grabbed his hand pulling him into the room. Will turned to close the door, only to find Chuckie Sullivan standing in the door way.
And where did this bit of script come from, you ask? A lost epilogue to the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting screenplay? A deleted scene? Thankfully, no. The answer is simple: Good Will Hunting fan fiction. It’s out there, believe it or not.
But amateur screenwriters on the internet aren’t the only ones imagining a cinematic reacquaintance with Good Will Hunting‘s Chuckie Sullivan. I’ve been hearing and reading many a comparison between Affleck’s The Town character and his more youthful and naive Good Will Hunting character.
Does The Town‘s Doug MacRay represent Chuckie’s character all grown up?
Well, no. No more so than The Departed is about the corruption of Will Hunting by organized crime or The Bourne Identity is the story of Will working for the NSA after all.
But there are some interesting comparisons.
The moment where the Ben Affleck character who does construction argues with his best boyhood friend the necessity of leaving town and going to a warmer state with lots of coastline. (Image comparison via robinjp.tumblr.com)
Global Comment‘s Mark Farnsworth writes:
MacRay could be Affleck’s Chuckie left behind by Will in Good Will Hunting, and in places The Town plays like an unofficial sequel about Chuckie’s life story. In that movie Chuckie berates Will for not taking his chance, “Fuck you, you don’t owe it to yourself man, you owe it to me. Cuz tomorrow I’m gonna wake up and I’ll be 50, and I’ll be doin’ this shit. And that’s all right. That’s fine. But you’re sittin’ on a winnin’ lottery ticket. And you’re too much of a pussy to cash it in, and that’s bullshit. Cause I’d do fuckin’ anything to have what you got. So would any of these fuckin’ guys. It’d be an insult to us if you’re still here in 20 years. Hangin’ around here is a waste of your time.”
So yes, the similarity between the scenes in which Affleck’s character argues for Will Hunting to leave Boston behind and in which he argues that he himself must leave Boston in The Town have obvious similarities. Affleck himself has said as much in an interview with AFP, recalling the Good Will Hunting “lottery ticket” speech, “I found myself back in the same scene.”
The AFP article continues:
In The Town, Affleck as the leader of a posse of bank robbers has a scene with Jeremy Renner, who plays his surrogate brother, which Affleck said was “heartbreaking in a different way and probably a more common way.”
It was “one guy saying, ‘I have to leave, I have to change, I have to do something different,’ and the other saying, ‘Stay with me, don’t leave me, don’t do that to me,’ and how hard it makes it to make that choice when you have your best friend, your brother … sitting there (saying): ‘I need you, don’t leave me.’”
Both scenes “spoke to that dynamic,” Affleck commented. “And in a larger sense they spoke to the importance of male friendships.”
Farnsworth’s Globe Comment analysis doesn’t end on a simple comparison between the two scenes, though. He goes on to describe the getting-out-of-town conceit as representative of not only Damon and Affleck’s respective characters, but their careers as well:
Chuckie’s words resonate loudly when applied to MacRay but they scream from the top of the Bunker Hill Monument in Affleck’s case. Whereas his boyhood pal Matt Damon has seen his career progress smoothly into iconic status with the Bourne films, Affleck has had to rebuild his after the whole “Bennifer” fiasco.
So is The Town Ben’s ticket out of the mediocre-film-career doldrums? (His “winnin’ lottery ticket”?)
And what other similarities between the films have you noticed? (Spoilers welcome.)
A Call for Anecdotes
Written by Alex on September 4th, 2010Okay, we know you’ve got ‘em. We’re looking for anecdotes about the time(s) you’ve seen Good Will Hunting.
Maybe the first time you saw it. Maybe other times. Seeing a movie in a movie theater lends itself to a more textured experience, so maybe if you saw it back in 1997/1998 you have a couple distinct memories about the experience.
Leave a comment below, email us, or submit your anecdote here.
I remember going by myself to the bigger theater in the next town, back in 1998. (It had a small release in December of 1997 but didn’t reach me in South Carolina until early 1998.) As far as I was concerned, Good Will Hunting was a small, indie movie for discerning viewers (like my 17-year-old self).
I had been to Boston before, and had lived in a suburb when I was younger. The next year I would go to college in western Massachusetts.
Getting home from the theater involved taking a small highway, not unlike the one seen at the end of the film, and I reflected upon my young life in a brooding, Matt-Damon-y way on the ride. Inspired (I was an artist, you see) by Gus Van Sant’s tonal choices in the film, I went to the little room off of the garage that I called “my studio,” where I had my art supplies set up. I did a small abstract oil painting, which relied heavily on yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and raw sienna (among my favorites, those earth tones).
Come with me; we’ll take the orange line.
Written by Alex on August 9th, 2010
I passed by Bunker Hill Community College on a rare use of the orange line the other day, and I was reminded of my biggest pet peeve in Good Will Hunting, which has got to be when Will comes in for his second therapy session, and Sean says simply, “Come with me.” In the next scene they are on a bench in Boston’s Public Garden, watching the swans go by and talking about the role experience has upon one’s intellectual maturity.
My experience tells me that you can’t just easily wander over to the Public Garden from Bunker Hill. It’s a two mile walk, which for America’s Walking City isn’t unreasonable, but it seems like Will and Sean’s conversation doesn’t begin until they get to that park bench. So I can’t watch that scene without imagining them awkwardly taking one of two trains (the orange line to Chinatown, or the green line to Arlington Station), or driving (but of course that would be crazy, because where would they park?)
So what makes the most sense to me is they took a cab. And I like to think of that as a deleted scene, wherein the cab driver is the cab driver character who’s in the Olympia Sports commercials that are always on during Red Sox games.
Get drunk and jump ship to the Red Sox
Written by Alex on August 8th, 2010A back-and-forth with Kevin Smith, some crude remarks about Minnie Driver, and other notable recent tweets about Good Will Hunting. This is What We Tweet When We Tweet About Good Will Hunting…
How come when I watch "good will hunting", I feel compelled to get drunk, jump ship to the Red Sox and read Howard Zinn books. GREAT MOVIE.
@ThatKevinSmith From all my research, I have to ask...how much of a hand DID you play in writing Good Will Hunting?
Via @morebanter "how much of a hand DID you play in writing Good Will Hunting" I helped the most by NOT ADDING ANYTHING except "This rules."
how the fuck am i going to write a 7 page paper about Good Will Hunting?
I have declared today job hunt and a movie day. Today's film Good Will Hunting. Excellent movie
Just watched Good Will Hunting for the first time. All I could think was "Isn't Minnie Driver a bit old to play a college student?"
Whenever I see Minnie Driver I can only see her doing that blowjob joke on Good Will Hunting
Rewatched Good Will Hunting thx to @togesky it's still a damn good movie. I'd totally bang Minnie Driver just to hear her laugh.
Good Will Hunting did get one thing right: Bostonians do curse like sailors. #butdotheylikeapples
Watching "Good Will Hunting" with the wife. How did Gus Van Sant get Robin Williams to stand/sit still that long? CGI?
I’m feeling lucky
Written by Alex on July 31st, 2010This is the 100th post on Blog Will Hunting, and to celebrate, a little retrospective….
Here is a list of some of my favorite of the hundreds of search terms that have brought people to the site.
I’m not sure everyone got what they were looking for. Nevertheless, enjoy.
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Same coffee, new receding hairline
Written by Dave on July 22nd, 2010Last week, Alex posted the trailer for The Town, a movie that looks like this: guns! Charlestown! Jon Hamm! The dude from The Hurt Locker! Jon Hamm! Fenway Park! Stubble! Jon Goddamn Hamm!
There’s a new Affleck trailer up, and while it’s not as exciting as the one for The Town, it’s certainly compelling. First of all, the cast for The Company Men includes Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Craig T. “Coach” Nelson, Rosemarie DeWitt (from Mad Men and Rachel Getting Married), Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, and Kingston’s own Chris Cooper. Hot damn!
This trailer has many highlights. Chief among them is this fact: the movie includes a scene in which Affleck, recently fired from a big corporation job, brings coffee for his colleagues on a construction site. Allow me to repeat that: In this movie, Ben Affleck’s character works on a construction site, and furthermore, in this movie, Ben Affleck brings coffee for others. Oh. My. God.
1997
2010
Another notable similarity to our Favorite Movie Of All Time: This movie has one egregiously terrible Boston accent. One might even go so far that, judging from the way he says “cahptenter” as if Katharine Hepburn on This Old House, Kevin Costner is the new Robin Williams. Congratulations, Costner; it looks like you’ve really out-Costnered yourself this time.
There’s a new gritty town, er, in town
Written by Alex on July 17th, 2010Move over Southie and Dorchester… there’s a new candidate for “one of the toughest neighborhoods in all of Boston… no place for the weak or innocent.”
A one square mile neighborhood called… Charlestown!!
I incidentally did a quick Google search of Charlestown and “bank robberies” and came up with this article about a series of robberies in Charleston, Summerville, and Dorchester. Apparently there’s a parallel universe of Boston neighborhoods in South Carolina, slightly misspelled. I wonder if they each have a Boylston Street?
Read all about the filming of The Town in Harvard Square, right here in a Blog Will Hunting post from last winter.
