Films featuring
Chris Cooper

The Town

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Let me be up front and say that Ben Affleck isn’t my favorite actor, especially when he’s not working for Kevin Smith. Somehow, he often seems out of his depth when he tries to stretch himself too far beyond that Good Will Hunting earnestness. Only two features into his directorial career, however, I’m quickly becoming a fan of his work behind the camera. We’ll see how he does when he moves outside the comfort zone of the Boston crime story, but maybe he shouldn’t bother. John Ford stuck mostly to westerns, and he did all right.

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Breach

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Spy movies basically come in two flavors. There are the action movies with the espionage background, like the Bond and Bourne movies, and then there are the movies that focus on the more mundane aspects of spy craft. These can be just as exciting, in their own way, as the high-octane actioner, if done correctly. Breach was done correctly.

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Jarhead

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Jarhead is a film about the other harsh reality of war, the tens of thousands of soldiers who endure endless days and weeks of crushing boredom, loneliness and deprivation, only to never get the chance to use the skills that they’ve often spent years honing. Anthony “Swoff” Swofford (Jake Gyllenhall) was a Marine Scout-Sniper during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He lives and breathes for that one perfect head-shot during a shooting war. “I want the pink mist,” he tells us, referring to the blood spray that results from a 7.62mm slug passing through a human cranium.

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Adaptation.

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I was sorely tempted to let my imaginary twin brother, Larry, write this review, but he was partaking of one of his many philanthropic pursuits, leading a deer hunting trip for a group of kids from the Braille Institute, and hasn’t been seen since.

Adaptation has a great deal in common with the other Charlie Kaufman films, mainly in how it plays with reality like your cat played with that gopher it caught in the back yard. While it’s “officially” based on the non-fiction book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), the movie is actually about Charlie Kaufman’s unsuccessful effort to write a usable script from the book, as well as about the author’s relationship with the subject of the story, a self-styled botanist named John Laroche (Chris Cooper). The other storyline revolves around Charlie’s fictitious twin Donald and his attempt to become a screenwriter like his brother.

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Syriana

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In his superb documentary Looking for Richard, Al Pacino comments how hard it is for actors and audiences to keep straight all of the characters in Shakespeare’s historical plays. Watching Syriana, I kind of knew how he felt. This film is confusing and not because it’s badly written or any other fault of its own. It’s confusing because it’s about oil and politics, a subject that lends itself naturally to confusion.

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The Bourne Identity

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Who’d have believed that Matt Damon, of all people, could provide a credible substitute for James Bond? However, with the hallowed Bond franchise in the midst of lean creative times, Damon is tautly believable as a CIA assassin with no memory of who he is and no idea why people are trying to kill him. Unlike Pierce Brosnan’s recent outings as the world famous super-spy, the writers do not let Damon down.

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