The odious career of Ben Affleck

Written by: Rob Van Winkle, CC2K Staff Writer

(A short note about his lover Matt Damon: it would stand to reason that I have as big a problem with Damon as I do with Affleck. The truth is that I want to hate them equally, but I cannot. Damon came up with the idea for Good Will Hunting, (Affleck just helped him write it, according to the mythology), and so he has some creative chops. He is also an undeniably better actor than Affleck. It must be concluded that he deserves success more. My problems with Matt Damon are twofold: he is a whiner, and my wife has a crush on him. By whiner, I mean that, despite the fact that I do not follow Hollywood gossip, I am aware that, more than once, Matt Damon put up a stink about not getting nominated for acting OSCARS™ that he felt he deserved. Poor fucking baby. And by crush, I mean that my wife once said that she thought he was cute. So he has my career, and the heart of my woman. Asshole. But I digress.)

So once Ben Affleck became BEN AFFLECK, there appeared two roads that he could have traveled; the same two roads that all actors choose from when they reach success. He could have attempted to become a true artist, picking roles in good movies that challenged him as a performer, using his status to get viewers to broaden their minds (see: Norton, Ed; Depp, Johnny; Hoffman, Dustin; etc.), or he could make his career decisions for “$lightly more $ecular Rea$on$.” His first two post-GWH roles should have prepared us for what was coming; he played “Paycheck Casher” in Phantoms, and “Newly Rich Guy who Fucks Liv Tyler” in Armageddon. He then attempted to do something artistic, playing a smallish role in Shakespeare in Love. Now this was indeed a good movie, but I haven’t seen it in years, and all I can seem to remember about it is that I walked out of it thinking Gwyneth Paltrow was far hotter than I had when I walked in (I can’t be the only person who thinks that, underneath all her glamour, she’s still just a mousy chick), and that Ben Affleck sucked. Seriously, that movie had Fiennes (Joseph, but still a Fiennes), Rush, Callow, Wilkinson … and Affleck. (In fact, am I remembering this wrong, or was his character an overbearing blowhard hack? If so, it was good casting at least …) He was awful, and he must have concluded, after shooting ended, that he should never do another good project again. And so he didn’t.

His list of projects after Shakespeare read like a dream line-up for a reviewer writing about shitty movies: Forces of Nature, Dogma, Boiler Room, Reindeer Games, Bounce, Pearl Harbor, The Sum of All Fears, etc. I don’t know if any of these movies made any money. If the justification for paying tremendous sums of money to actors is that they translate into box office clout, then why the hell is he still headlining projects?

Darling, let’s go out tonight! Can you put on the green dress … you know, the titty one?

For whatever reason, he still is, but it is at this point that Affleck transcends overpaid-actor status to become something truly reviled. While still making terrible movies, it is at some point around this period where he decides to become an out-and-out media whore (more on this later). Simultaneously, he seemingly decided to metaphorically stick his hands in his ears and do a “Nyah Nyah Nyah, Catch me if you can” thing to us. Not only is he rich and famous, he seemed to taunt, but he is now so famous that he can make a total mockery of the movie business, and still make more money per project than most of us will ever see. He has taken out his metaphorical cock, and sprayed metaphorical piss all over our metaphorical rug, all the while flicking his metaphorical finger in our metaphorical faces.

The first movie of this, what I am now calling his “Fuck you, Faggot!” career phase, was Daredevil, in which he played a blind (!) lawyer (!!) super hero (!!!!!). There are many people out there who would disagree with my lumping this movie in this category, no doubt insisting that it deserves to be placed squarely in the less-awful “Merely Shitty Movies” phase. However, despite not hating (and actually seeing) this movie, I argue its placement based on what it means to Affleck. There is simply no logical reason on earth that he should have been picked for this role. He does not look tough, and he does not act tough. I am no fighter, but even I can tell that he has the glassiest jaw in the world. He got the role because of his name. It’s clear to see what’s in it for him; by acting like an ass-kicker, and having all other people on set pretending that he’s a badass, he can have the ultimate loser revenge of knowing that all the guys who beat him up growing up would now have to endure watching other people act like they fear him. On film. He’s no better than the kid who tapes himself pretending to be a ninja expert with a broom handle; he just has people paying him million of dollars to do it.

Gigli. Paycheck. Jersey Girl. Surviving Christmas. These are the next four films, chronologically, after Daredevil. Two of these movies co-starred his girlfriend at the time. One is the way aforementioned Holiday “comedy” that came out in October, and one is called Paycheck. Need I say more? On Affleck’s docket next is a movie called Man About Town and a comedy about the World Series of Poker. Anyone want to bet they’re going to suck? Hard?

Having said all this, there are still plenty of successful Actors out there whose careers are just as laughable and whorish as Affleck’s, and yet don’t rate a whole essay denouncing them. (See: Cage, Nicholas; Farrell, Colin; Olivier, Sir Laurence; etc.) What makes Affleck so much worse than all the others combined was the way he embraced the media fucking nature of celebrity, while still trying to keep a nudge-and-wink relationship with the public. For example, did you know that he apparently dated Jennifer Lopez? I bet you did. Lopez, for those who don’t know, is an actress/singer/skank who dated Sean “Puff ‘P-Diddy’ Daddy” Combs until they got arrested, thereby rendering him no longer beneficial to her career. So she ran out and married one of her back-up dancers. When that got her as far as it could go, she needed a guy with enough clout to keep her in the papers; someone who would revel in the preening for the cameras as much as she. Enter our Ben. At least other Hollywood couples pretend that they just want to be left alone. Ben and Jen (known collectively by the single nom-de-plume “Afflopez”) posed for every shot, could be seen pointing and smiling when they were “caught” on camera at a Red Sox game, and even did a Barbara Walters special about their relationship. (Where Ben, in that ever-so-charming way he has of bucking Hollywood trends and saying things the way they are, referred to her green whore dress as “the titty dress,” justifying his word usage because he was sure they were going to cut it. [Writer’s note: I don’t know who’s more deserving of disgust for this moment: Walters, for having this interview at all, Affleck, for saying it, the editors and executives, who kept it in to spite him, or Lopez, who was momentarily “offended,” but only until Walters then complimented her on said dress.]). The day they broke up was a day mourned by no one the world over. He is now dating another starlet of course, and they too could be seen at Fenway Park, “just like you and me!” Except when I go to a baseball game, I am guessing that most people don’t want to shove their scorecard pencils into my trachea.

These days, Affleck can even be heard making fun of himself. On Saturday Night Live recently, he derided his own career, saying that he “walked out of Paycheck and demanded his money back, until he remembered that he was in it.” This kind of self-congratulatory embrace of his own ineptitude is, in my opinion, his worst crime. If he goes on to become the next Olivier some day (yes, I was kidding earlier), I will still hate him as the guy who became rich, got high on his own fame, and puked up his own excesses on a public that, for some reason, keeps trying to like him. (Confidential to the movie-going public: Stop doing this. You’re only encouraging him. If you cease paying attention, he will rehabilitate himself, or ideally, go away.)

In conclusion, despite the fact that Affleck will almost certainly continue to make movies (that will just as certainly suck), I will never see them. And neither should anyone else. His odious track record proves that there is no way on earth that his future movies will ever be actually good, and his past movies show that he is simply too smarmy and devoid of self-respect (to the contrary, he clearly loves himself almost as much as he thinks everyone else does) to be good even for mockery in the genre of “Bad Movies for Comedic Purposes.” Our mothers always said of bullies that, if we ignore them, they will go away. If we work together, we can, God willing, prove the same thing true of Ben Affleck.

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