Week 39: Gone Baby Gone

I have to stop judging movies by their titles. Because all along I believed Gone Baby Gone was Ben Affleck’s cinematic tribute to his hairline. Zing!

Sorry, I don’t know why I love to rip on Ben Affleck, but I just can’t help meself. But even I am gallant enough to admit when my horseheaded foe has pulled off a winner. Kudos to you…Secretariat.

The movie follows a private investigator (Ben Affleck’s little bro, Casey “Ponyhead” Affleck) as he unravels the complicated disappearance of a little girl in a working-class Boston neighborhood. The plot is fairly intricate and the turns and twists really kept us surprised. Just when you thought you know what happened to little Amanda, a new seam opened up and you had to examine a new cast of characters. Grant was correct in identifying that the movie had a resemblance to the same gritty/scary/raw feel of “Se7en”.

The best parts of Gone Baby Gone are handled by the supporting cast, particularly Amy Ryan playing the missing girl’s train wreck of a mother – a hardscrabble drug addict who might be more concerned about getting her next fix than getting her daughter back. Her callous disregard for her only daughter will make any suburban soccer mom absolutely shiver with horror. It was riveting.

My problems with the film? There are a couple:
1. I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND A GODDAMN WORD CASEY AFFLECK SAID. I’m all for using authentic Boston accents, but give me a break. I’ve never had to use my rewind button on the DVD remote so many times. It was nearly impossible to figure out who he was referring to in any given conversation. After more than an hour of “Rhemnybeaschuuond”, we finally figured out he was saying a person’s name: Remy Bressant, and not just describing an itchy rash on his left buttock.

2. Casey Affleck is not a leading man. I’m sorry. He did his best. His acting was just fine, but he simply lacks the presence to carry a film. And, yes, he has unfortunately inherited the Affleck family curse. The one in which your head outgrows the rest of your body at a staggering pace until you resemble one of those cartoon characters skating in the Ice Capades. Let’s all put our hands together, ladies and gentlemen, for the amazing Equine Duo, Ben and Casey Affleck!!!!! Neigh!!!

Week 9: The Bourne Ultimatum

Man, Ben Affleck's ass must be really chapped about the success of the Bourne series. Just imagine him at the height of his popularity several years ago, stroking the hair plugs J. Lo made him get while he mused over the stacks of scripts studios were plying him with.

I could go Ocean's 11, he must have thought. Nah, Clooney and Pitt are all washed up. I could do this Bourne project. But no, that's probably going to be a bomb. I'll give it to Damon. That should be a laugh riot. Wait. What's this? Daredevil? A script about a blind superhero no one has ever heard of and probably will never care about? This is gold! Theatric gold! J. Lo, put on your mink eyelashes and tell me that you love me. When you're wearing your mink eyelashes, they hide the lies.

Lucky for audiences everywhere, Affleck took Daredevil and Damon took Bourne. And the world is a better place for it. I know this rekindles the deep fear that I am secretly a twelve-year-old boy, but I have to admit I love this series. Love it, love it, love it. It's thrilling, suspenseful and the action sequences are great. Especially since director Paul Greengrass took over the franchise in the Bourne Supremacy and introduced us to the handheld camera action sequence. It's a little dizzying at times, but it's so damn fun to watch, who cares? We were off on vacation today and it's too hot to do anything outside so we rushed off to the theater to see the final installment of the series.

The Bourne Ultimatum doesn't break any new ground but it's filled with the edge-of-your-seat action sequences we've come to expect. I have to admit that there are times in Ultimatum when Matt Damon is banged up so badly you have to question whether or not he has super-human abilities to recover from injuries. I once crashed a car in college and had minor whiplash, which I complained about at length for an entire week. Every time I took a sip of water I winced and re-told the story of my crash to anyone who would listen. I'm not proud of it, but it's true.

By my count, Jason Bourne endured four massive car crashes, including one car heaved over the edge of a multi-story car lot, landing upside down, and yet he still scampered away each time as though he'd just had a run-in with a pesky mosquito.

I'll admit that I never would have pegged Matt Damon to be an action hero, but you've got to give him his due in the Bourne series. He really did a good job. And I just watched him promoting the movie on The Daily Show and damned if he wasn't likable to boot.

Somewhere in Massachusetts sits a man with an incredibly large forehead and an old set of hair plugs, plotting his revenge on the success of the Bourne series. He's stroking the withering remnants of a pair of false eyelashes while he reads the script that he believes will redeem him: Daredevil 2: Still Blind and Rather Uninteresting.

Week 5: Hollywoodland

Diane Lane! Someone put a horse head in your bed! Oh, wait. It's just Ben Affleck.

Hollywoodland, for those of you who don't know (and I presume that to be all of you since this movie had zero press) is the story of the mysterious death of George Reeves, the actor who played Superman on TV in the fifties.

While watching this film, one has plenty of time to consider which is larger, Ben Affleck's gum line or his forehead. The man has a large noggin. I do too, Ben. It's not a crime. It's just that you're a film actor and I'm not, so nobody really spends a good hour and fifty minutes staring hard at mine.

I can even see why ol' horsehead got cast as the actor who played Superman in this movie. He's tall, has broad shoulders and a very Superman-like hairline (although in later scenes in the movie he is wearing a wig so cheap and obvious it looks like it was fished out of a discount bin at Toupees 'r Us). Did I mention that you see Affleck naked in this movie? If you haven't fled from your computer screen yet, you should knjow that he was much more jiggly than one would think. It was one of those naked scenes that make you tilt your head really far to the side as you ponder where the jiggles came from.

I really liked the story of this movie and it's told in an interesting way with Adrian Brody playing the oozy, oily private investigator hired to probe Reeve's death, which is ruled as a suicide while all the clues point to his murder.

But here's the big rub with this movie. Yes, there is something even bigger than Affleck's forehead here. It's the casting of Diane Lane as his mistress. Rather, he plays her mistress. Mistor? I don't know what the male word is for that. The point is, Lane plays the older wife of a powerful studio executive who takes on Benny as her little side dish of man-puddin'. Or Mistor.

I could say a lot of lovely things about Diane Lane. In the game "who would you turn lesbian for", she is right up there for me in the top three (next to Scarlett Johansson and Salma Hayek, if you really must know). I think she's a fine actress and is generally lovely to look at, but her chemistry with Ben Affleck is way, way off in this film. Maybe it's because she's made up to look like she's sixty-five and it makes the site of her canoodling with Ben Affleck look like an uncensored version of the Golden Girls Gone Wild. Or maybe it's the incredibly stiff, stilted dialogue they speak with weird accents that make them both sound like film noir versions of real people.

Whatever it is, it doesn't work. And so instead of paying attention to their scenes, you find yourself studying her features and trying to figure out how the hair and make-up people in this movie managed to make her look so dull and lusterless. And then you are blinded by the size of Affleck's forehead again and you forget all about Diane Lane. And suddenly you have an itch to visit the racetrack.