Ben Affleck is by no means the savior of the city for making a movie all about Boston. It's just a movie, after all. But some recent harsh criticism from Slate surprised us. Dorchester native Patrick Radden Keefe notes the abundance of aesthetically challenged individuals in the movie and declares, "The result is not so much what [Scorcese's] Mean Streets did for New York as what Deliverance did for Appalachia."

Cue the umbrage. Did he just compare the Dorchester as seen in Gone Baby Gone to Deliverance, as in "squeal like a pig, boy" Deliverance? Keefe doesn't think Dorchester is as ugly as it looks in the movie, and that's true, but Gone Baby Gone is a movie, and exaggerations and Hollywood cinema go hand in hand. An appearance by an "ugly" or even normal person in a Hollywood movie is rare and wonderful these days, and Affleck should be commended for recognizing that normal people exist. Gone Baby Gone wasn't commissioned by the tourism department.

And we're still steamed that someone compared Affleck's representation of Dorchester residents to the North Georgia redneckers of Deliverance. A writer needs to be careful when drawing a link between the presentation of a neighborhood and "Dueling Banjos." And what's wrong with ugly people in movies? Is it okay as long as it's not one's hometown? No one is irate with how John Waters treats Baltimore--and the pretty people are few and far between in his movies, the early ones at least.

While it may seem as if we're slaying Keefe, he accurately notes that "Boston has never translated well on film." Bostonist saw the contemptible Boston Strangler on AMC and nearly kicked the TiVo. So, we open the floor to you--are there any good presentations of Boston on film? Was Good Will Hunting overrated in that department? Did Gone Baby Gone get it right?

Opinions expressed in this post belong to this Bostonist only.