When you take into account Reverse Shot’s reputation for consistently bursting the bubble on over-hyped art house darlings (I became an Andrew Tracy fan after he called Pan’s Labyrinth “dreck” last year), for taking challenging and/or unfashionable positions on filmmakers and stars (see Justin Stewart’s analysis of Colin Farrell’s performance in Miami Vice here), and for just generally being contrarian, the most surprising thing about their latest issue is how closely many of the pieces hew to the critical party line. No one needs Reverse Shot to tell them that the Farrelly Brothers have “suck[ed] all of the soul and much of the meaning out of The Heartbreak Kid,” or that Across the Universe is a “disastrous…pawning [of] the Sixties as nostalgia to a younger generation,” while “I’m Not There is great art.”
But where the new releases section falters a bit, the issue’s main thrust, a symposium on Gus Van Sant, restores faith. Justin Stewart, in particular, saves the day, with two pieces on films sprung from the grey matter of Mr. Ben Affleck.
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Emma Forrest’s defense of Ben Affleck/glowing review of Gone Baby Gone in Friday’s Guardian is more than just your standard, short celebrity puff/think piece; it’s the short celebrity puff/think piece Forrest has been sitting on for years. There are four mentions of Affleck in the first fifty pages of Namedropper, Forrest’s first novel, which was probably the best thing to happen to teenage girls and the adults who are enamored with them since My So-Called Life. The mention that I remember most vividly comes from a passage in which the 16 year-old heroine, Viva, is explaining why she rebuffed an opportunity to meet with her estranged mother:
Last time my mother came out of the Buddhist retreat, she tried to set up a reunion with me. But I didn’t want to meet her. She’d been in a Buddhist retreat for five years. I know she wouldn’t have heard of Ben Affleck and that it would just annoy me.
The idea of knowing Ben Affleck comes up again and again in Namedropper, which was published a couple of years after Affleck won an Oscar for writing Good Will Hunting. Viva’s friends and nemeses either don’t know who Affleck is or can’t remember his name, which is just one element of the pop-culture obsessed heroine’s sense of isolation. Forrest’s new appreciation of Affleck would seem to stand as Viva’s vindication. It contends that the former J. Lo consort “had this film in him” but was forced to keep it hidden “all the time that MTV had on heavy rotation a yacht-shot video of him caressing his bling fiancee’s ass.” In other words: what Forrest/Viva knew all along has now been revealed to rest of us. Read more here.
CHICAGO – It wasn’t that long ago when Ben Affleck was an unknown. Fortune eventually smiled upon him and along came quality performances in independents and an Academy Award for screenwriting.
Then came “Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor” and a series of nauseating tabloid stories involving something called “Bennifer”. Affleck’s public image as either a true filmmaker or a hack is riding heavily on his directorial debut of “Gone Baby Gone”.
Without fail, he falls easily into the category of true talent. Following the path that fellow actor-turned-director Clint Eastwood did with “Mystic River,” Affleck elevated a crime thriller by author Dennis Lehane to the big screen.
Click here to read the full review by Dustin Levell…
This film premiered as part of the Chicago International Film Festival on Oct. 10, 2007.
