Boston, home of the new American noir.
Ben Affleck's directorial debut "Gone Baby Gone" is one of the best American movies of the decade, though somehow most people never found out (it stalled at $20 million domestically). Its greatest achievement is its sense of place -- shooting in Boston, Affleck spent a lot of time highlighting the terrifying alcoholic faces of the city's poorer residents. "By rule you have to use a certain number of SAG people," he explained. "But SAG extras have a certain look -- they're put together. So I said: 'O.K., we'll use the SAG actors. I just don't want to see them." What he got was some of the scariest verisimilitude this side of "The Wire." Boston's become the setting of choice for utterly unromanticized noir. At the Boston Phoenix, Peter Keogh considers the resurgence of filmmaking in the city. For years, it was too dangerous to shoot in: teamsters would extort the...
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