Why is everybody watching The Town all of a sudden?
Affleck's back!? Kind of.
Is i just me, or is everybody into The Town again? Everybody I know seems to be watching it. My HBO Max account is pushing it aggressively, and this stragey appears to be working across the board. The Town is the talk of the town, so to speak, sixteen years after its release.
But why? Why now? Why The Town? Don’t get me wrong… The Town is a fantastic movie. Directed by Ben Affleck and co-written by Affleck and Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard (adapted from Chuck Hogans novel The Prince of Thieves), it’s the story of a crew of bank robbers who pull off a heist and take a bank teller (Rebecca Hall) hostage. But the leader of the gang (Affleck) falls in love with her. The story from the opposite perspective is as follows: A bank teller is taken as a hostage by a gang of robbers, but after she’s returned safely, she falls in love with a man she does not realize is the head of the robbery crew.
I don’t know. Anyway, go watch The Town.
Olivia Rutigliano
Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and CrimeReads. Her other work appears in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham's Quarterly, AirMail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Baffler, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from the departments of English/comparative literature and theatre at Columbia University, where she was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow. She hosts the podcasst "Culture Schlock" at Lit Hub Radio. She is on instagram at @oldebean, twitter at @oldrutigliano, and bluesky at @oliviarutigliano.bsky.social.
