How Do We Feel About Ben Affleck?

He's made some shit movies, but I generally like him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDJGEdF_F4E

likeable dude, funny

He's made some shit movies, but I generally like him.

His scenes in Mallrats. "Who's yer favorite New Kid? Call me Joey!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRFmAYh3aRc

i will always associate him w/ his douchebagging yacht-style in this video

motherfucker's on a boat

his olbermann on snl was pretty great

Baffleck is alright. He seems a dude who has moved into a more stable, less douchey phase.

yah i get that for most ppl he has transcended but i am like the ornery creep he went to school with who will never forget what a dick he once was. i have learnt to accept this.

V good @ playing an asshole in dazed & confused

He gave up alcohol, didn't he? He looks too sane to ever break down.

whereas I can still kick it with Damon and a bottle of Jameson's.

Remember this:

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/covergallery/img/2000/nov102000_568_lg.jpg

lol that cover or bounce?

i think of bounce every time i board a plane

I like him! I like his Kevin Smith stuff a lot (yes even Jersey Girl stfu), dug the Town...and he's always good value on SNL.

Bennifer doesn't seem like it happened 10 years ago and it's scary to get nostalgic over it. I remember the whole hype leading up to the wedding only for it to be anticlimactic.

Dude is sort of irrelevant to my life. My hostility towards good looking men has waned more and more as I progress through the Buffy spin-off, Angel. Somehow.

And Angel is the goodlookingest of men indeed

Elevated above his station, but might have become a fine character actor in a parallel history.

Affleck's agent (or himself) chooses terrible projects. Seriously. After 20+ films I have zero interest in paying to see, he joins my list of actors whose projects I avoid (alongside Cruise, Bullock, Aniston, Roberts etc.)

tom cruise has been in some awesome movies dude

I'm a bit drunk and incensed that Affleck is a bankable commodity, and most moviegoers know Holm or Hurt only by the names of their characters. There ain't no justice in a world that permitted this.

those two guys are like 25 years older than ben affleck

xp max (and an aside to the thread): Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut, evidently last grasps at an Oscar, were both 11 years ago. Kubrick or P.T. Anderson use top-billing actors well. With contempt, if neccessary.

You avoid Eric Roberts' movies? Big mistake imo

They're older. Damon (for example) isn't. And picks far, far better roles in general.

mission impossible 3 was pretty awesome

m:i 3 was great! philip seymour hoffman was one of the best screen villains of the decade along w/DDL in GONY

collateral and minority report are solid fukken movies u no its true cuz i swore

ben affleck has been in a bunch of movies i havent seen but state of play was p good when i watched it on cable one night

he's some shit, generally

state of play was kinda sucky tbrr

the bbc miniseries is all right tho

it was a miniseries?

i didnt like the mini that much (better than movie obv) - well made w/some good acting (nighy) but i didnt feel wrapped up in the characters or the mystery at all

movie's distracting because of russell crowe's morbid obesity

state of play was really long but i remember some choice helen mirren stuff (she sits in a chair iirc) & like rachel mcadams doing her thing, discovering unsavoury secrets in hotel rooms or s.thing...

id like to go to bat for it bcuz i remember enjoying it but its all p hazy

it was a lot better than the movie, which was still p good imo.

MI:3 wasnt partic worthy to carry the title of successor to MI:2, which was pretty shitty itself. Imo.

i didnt like the mini that much (better than movie obv) - well made w/some good acting (nighy) but i didnt feel wrapped up in the characters or the mystery at all

movie's distracting because of russell crowe's morbid obesity

― Princess TamTam, Thursday, December 30, 2010 2:40 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah was hard for me to sympathize with the main guy, something intensely unlikeable about him, plus he looks like thom yorke

superfluous 'plus' imo

yall gotta see gone baby gone

Love Gone Baby Gone. I think Casey is the better actor of the two but I do really like them both and would totally KIW. btw - I completely forgot that he went out with JLO until just now. That was weird.

i've seen 'jersey girl', and once referred to 'the overhated jersey girl', but the sub-editor changed it to 'the overrated jersey girl' which was kind of baffling

also 'valkyrie' is... way above average

he is goodlooking in a way i
dont even slightly care abt

i think state of play was ok but i think i must have left the roombc i literally only remember the 1st 20mins

Affleck is good when given good roles. Boiler Room, Hollywoodland, Changing Lanes. His detour into leading man action star nearly destroyed him, c. this:

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/gq/406-1.jpg

But the bit where he imitated Matt Damon on "SNL," mostly by making his ears stick out? Classic, if only for his near inability to keep a straight face.

from what year...?

you guys rlly hard up for thread topics this time of year

"hard"

at least with Blackberry you have the hook of Glenn Howerton looking ridiculous

Seems like there was a time this would have been a natural hit.

A movie about the thrilling drama behind...Air Jordans? Fuck, I'm pretty cynical about humanity but I can't imagine people ever going for that.

Watch his wife's new movie instead — The Mother, on Netflix. It's a solid action movie; she does lots of running and sniper-ing and fighting, which reminds you that action movies are full of what are basically choreographed dance numbers, and she knows how to move in front of a movie camera.

really feel like there should be a thread like movies that should have been documentaries instead. like biopics will always have that problem but this is a topic where it's like...couldn't you have just made a documentary using available sources and had it be just as interesting? the fuck I gotta Good Will Hunt this shit

A movie about the thrilling drama behind...Air Jordans? Fuck, I'm pretty cynical about humanity but I can't imagine people ever going for that.

Jerry Maguire, The Social Network, American Hustle, and Argo itself all made a lot of money (200-250 million each--I checked); this exists somewhere in there. It's a natural movie subject.

Argo is a political thriller, American Hustle is a crime movie, Jerry Maguire is a romantic dramedy. I don’t see any link between them and business hagiography.

Unless Air gets deep into Jordan’s father being murdered over gambling debts.

It's impressive that you're able to figure all this out without actually having seen the film. (Which, I didn't realize, has been out for over a month and is doing decent business, not quite the disaster I deduced from my very large sample size of one screening--a little shy of $100 million, 16th for the year. So apparently there are people seeing it, though not as many as I would have thought 10 or 20 years ago.)

American Hustle is a crime movie

And so is Heat, and those two films couldn't be more dissimilar. There's this thing called tone, too.

It's impressive that you're able to figure all this out without actually having seen the film.

Well, it's a movie about making the most successful sneaker brand in history, not rescuing hostages, FBI undercover operations, dweebs being given ungodly wealth and losing their souls, etc..

Heat, a crime drama, does have more in common with a crime comedy than the story of shoes, yes.

All of them are about the action is the juice.

Your imagination seems to begin and end at the word "about," so short of actually seeing the film, I think we're at a dead end here. (Bicycle Thieves and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure are both about missing bikes.)

Here's the thing that, as always, amazes me: I posted about seeing a mediocre film with a terrible soundtrack, and two guys who haven't seen it want to make an issue out of an aside I tacked on at the end.

Didn’t mind the soundtrack too much, good to see the Violent Femmes getting some coin. I did nearly walk out of the cinema though when opening track was ‘Money for Nothing’ which came out in 1975.

1985!

This lists all the songs: https://screenrant.com/air-movie-soundtrack-songs/

So it's more like a window (which did occur to me when "The Message" popped up--I knew that was a little earlier). Affleck must be very big on the Violent Femmes, having also directed Gone Baby Gone.

really feel like there should be a thread like movies that should have been documentaries instead. like biopics will always have that problem but this is a topic where it's like...couldn't you have just made a documentary using available sources and had it be just as interesting? the fuck I gotta Good Will Hunt this shit

― Qeq-hauau-ent-pehui (Neanderthal), Saturday, May 13, 2023 11:13 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

OTM its harder to think of the reverse - biopics that justify being biopics

Gene Siskel used to wonder after reviewing a bad movie whether a documentary about the lead actors pitching the movie at lunch, over drinks, to agents, etc. would've been more compelling.

(xpost) With occasional exceptions--The Social Network comes to mind--I've always made the same argument. And if you are going to fictionalize real events/lives, I'd point to something like I'm Not There (even though I wasn't personally that big on the film) as justification for doing so.

Or even something like Amadeus (which to be fair I haven't seen for decades). Some of my least favorite movies are beat by beat biopics that try to recreate real life events to the last familiar detail.

Straight Outta Compton was a movie that both showed the right and wrong way to do it.

First half of it involved aspects of the rappers lives that people were less familiar with, depicting their personalities and desires. Second half just felt like a filmed Wikipedia article.

I haven't seen any of the Queen, Elton John, Whitney etc. musical biopics, but I imagine they are all very guilty of that.

The Elton flick takes more risks

i have a regal pass so i kinda saw air just to see it, with friends, and also the last duel taught me that if affleck is acting in a silly wig it's prob worth seeing (and that aspect was). rest of the film was ok, dudes on the phone saying "fuck" and "asshole" on their way to some epic win, obnoxious soundtrack and endless pans over commercial products that signified we were in the 1980s to the point where i did kinda feel like i was in an advertisement that was eating itself, not sure that was affleck's intent

i like argo fine but it's similar to this one in that is extremely a Type of Movie, and it is just that Type of Movie as much as it can possibly be

i did think it was funny that jordan wanting a stake in the shoe was such a big plot arc, affy obv felt some of kind of "artists' rights!" righteousness there that doesn't totally map onto the subject matter for me but good for him

One thing I found puzzling is the language you mention, especially Chris Messina's tirade when Damon does his end-around with Jordan's parents. Absent that, the film wouldn't have an R-rating and could be seen by kids and young teenagers.

I don't know how hard it is for, say, a 14-year-old to get into an R-film unaccompanied by an adult in 2023--in my day it was easy--but it seems to me that they're giving up a potential audience right away for the sake of some pointless profanity. (It doesn't make the film any better.) Maybe with kids addicted to Marvel films (or with no interest in films at all), it's a moot point. But I have this quaint notion that a film about the transformation of Michael Jordan from basketball player to uber-icon would be of interest to that demographic.

Wait, it's rated R? Wow.

When I first heard about it I assumed it was a TV movie (though I suppose from what I hear it could perhaps best be described as an airplane movie; I expect to see it playing on the back of many seats next long flight I take).

Fair amount of language...I didn't know IMDB actually quantified this. 65 uses of "fuck" in Air; just out of curiosity I looked up Taxi Driver, and it used "fuck" 33 times. Ben Affleck needed twice as many "fuck"s as Taxi Driver to tell the story of Air Jordans.

Affleck (holding up a sneaker like Hamlet holding a skull): "These fuckin' shoes, they cost so fuckin' much! Fuck!"

"These fucking shoes!"

I find it a bit odd that there's even a movie about fucking shoes? Why?
What has this world come to

How many 14-year-olds were wanting to see a movie about some shoes from 39 years ago until there were too many swears?

The kids are all waiting for the movie about the "bo knows" ad campaign.

I talk about sports-related stuff all the time in the classroom, and it's been my experience, even in Canada, that Michael Jordan is one of the (very) few athletes who goes back more than a decade that kids are still interested in. They'll have opinions on the LeBron-Michael GOAT debate.

I am most definitely the WRONG person to talk to about sports...

from a sports-related perspective anyway - sports broadcasting? that gets me going! Lol...

pretty sure documentaries made substantially less money than the Elvis movie or whatever

Lol Omar

it was funny that jordan wanting a stake in the shoe was such a big plot arc, affy obv felt some of kind of "artists' rights!" righteousness there that doesn't totally map onto the subject matter

Black athletes were starting to get paid more by the mid-80s (big thanks go to Curt Flood for taking team owners to court over their suppression of free-agency), but Jordan was the first to take firm control of his brand, became the first sports billionaire and was much a hero among Black Americans for that fact as he is for his prowess with a basketball. He stuck it to the owners and made them pay him what he was worth. It was a revelation at the time.

oh absolutely, not arguing with that, was just kinda trying to locate why affleck chose this project

honestly i learned more than i expected to about the shoe industry and its historical associations with basketball watching this

for the record i am a huge idiot who knows nothing about shoes or basketball

still there was something fundamentally holographic to the experience of watching a movie all about brands enhancing each other's brands

A movie about the thrilling drama behind...Air Jordans? Fuck, I'm pretty cynical about humanity but I can't imagine people ever going for that.

Jerry Maguire, The Social Network, American Hustle, and Argo itself all made a lot of money (200-250 million each--I checked); this exists somewhere in there. It's a natural movie subject.

I think there are enough people (a lot of them adult men, yes) who enjoy seeing how someone gets something done when it's a high-risk and individual idea and the institution around them is barely interested. And seeing a story like that within a realm like sports or cars (Moneyball, Ford v. Ferrari) makes it seem more fun than righteous.

Anyway, the music cues in Air are pretty insufferable, but anyone stuck in a job where they wish they could change the system can get a thrill out of a dramatic model for doing so.

You do a better job of explaining that than I did (and what links those movies). My estimation of Air ticked up just a bit after struggling through BlackBerry the next day.

A friend and I did a Zoomcast on Air, which I watched a second time and liked better:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=c43Vh1F0IGY

I don't know how Air's half-cinema/half-Prime existence affects something like the Academy Awards, but I do hope Viola Davis is nominated. Her performance defines the kind of supporting role that takes over a workmanlike movie and stays in your mind after the rest fades away.

It was released in theaters in April and then on Prime in May, so it is Oscar-eligible.

Actually, I think you can debut on streaming the same day as a theatrical release and still be eligible, you just can't debut on streaming first.

I figured it was eligible, just wasn't sure if there's an unspoken bias against such films come awards time (or more so now that we're not right in the middle of COVID). I know The Power of the Dog was heavily nominated, but that was 2021.

Yeah I think the best aspect of Air was underlining Jordan’s mom and how formidable she was. Viola was terrific

The soundtrack def irritated me

But I enjoyed the sports marketing-ness of it and i liked all the basketball stuff too, i thought Damon’s character was interesting

Honestly i was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it vs my expectations going in that it was going to be a dumb boring movie

To the contrary, I think that movies that are widely available to stream probably have an awards advantage because more people will see them.

In any event, this kind of release schedule no longer seems that unusual. Not that they'll be vying for awards attention, but M3gan and Cocaine Bear both appeared on Peacock about 6 weeks after their theatrical release. 80 for Brady was on Paramount Plus two months after it debuted in theaters. And all of these were box office hits.

That makes sense--in which case, Davis should be a shoo-in, even with the film being released early in the year. Honestly, I wouldn't mind Damon getting nominated either.

One scene I didn't mention in either the Zoomcast or my earlier posts but should have is where Davis, over the phone, spells out her one remaining condition before her son will sign with Nike.

Think the thing I liked most about Air was that office.