The best thing about Fall

Forget the foliage. The best thing about autumn is that I no longer have to suffer through those abominable summer blockbusters. And the reward always justifies the wait. The only downside is that I almost feel compelled to gorge myself, watching 2, or even 3 movies, each week in order not to miss seeing the year's best movies on the big screen.

Gone Baby Gone, although spotty in terms of story line, was one of the only movies since Good Will Hunting to feature Boston accents that didn't make me wince. How is it that actors can miraculously eradicate all trace of an Australian accent but almost no can really nail down that awful, harsh massacring of the English language you hear in Boston (and Rhode Island). It's so distracting to watch an otherwise great movie if you have to listen to someone deliver a bad accent badly. So it was extremely pleasing to watch Amy Ryan who apparently blew director Ben Affleck's socks off. He said she is the only actor not from Boston ever to convince him that she could be. Her entire performance as a Dorchester trailer trash equivalent was so gratingly authentic that I wanted to hit her -- and it made me grateful that I no longer lived in that town (which really did get on my very last nerve virtually every day I lived there).

I'm not familiar with much of Ms. Ryan's prior work which is mostly TV. (We don't get cable in these parts and even if we did, we wouldn't subscribe since there's not much worth watching that you cant get on Netflix.) She does play McNulty's girlfriend on The Wire, though. One of the best TV series available on Netflix (with an unbelievable and well-deserved IMDB user rating of 9.7 out of 10) -- but that's a posting for another day.