Gone Decisive Feelings About Ben Affleck Gone

Reasons to hate Gone Baby Gone: "Okay guys, have you seen Mystic River? I mean, effing heart-wrenching, right? It was like Mr. Eastwood wrote an elegy to the faults of the human heart with a camera, tinted it blue, like the characters totally got the blues, and told the actors to cry like someone was castrating them as they were delivering their lines. This was some heavy stuff. Did you know it was actually a book before it was a movie? It's so wild when that happens.

No no no Ron, don't get up. I'm actually going somewhere with this. I know I know, I've started upwards of forty conversations with this same introduction, but this time it's different. This time, an idea is forming in the roots of my mind grapes.

(Awkward pause). Okay, so sometimes authors write more than one book. This Mystic River dude, he wrote another book. Can you guess where I'm going with this? (Execs look at watches). This other book is called Gone Daddy Gone. Yeah, like the Violent Femmes song. It's about a detective who lives in....wait for it...BOSTON! GO RED SOX! I'm from there. Kinda. And I'm like a detective. I detect the souls in my character and project them to the screen with equal amounts of wincing and aloofness. So I totally know what to do with this.

No, I don't want to just write a check. I don't want to just go to the meetings. Can you guess? Can you? Yeah I know, the quasi-screenwriter becomes an actor becomes a director. It's progress to the nth degree. Like Mr. Eastwood, who directed Mystic River! Dirty Harry is to Million Dollar Baby as Reindeer Games is to Paycheck! Kind of!

Oh by the way, I'm gonna cast my baby brother as the lead detective. You can't stop me, money men."

Reasons that Gone Baby Gone is actually good: "Dear Mr. Affleck,

I'm sorry I wrote that awful blog post pretending to be you pitching your first directing job to big Hollywood execs. In retrospect, it was childish of me.

I actually saw Gone Baby Gone this weekend and turns out, you're a very capable director. Wait, I didn't mean that I took your acting ability as an indicator of how good you'd be at other things. Wait, I didn't mean that I've always thought you were a terrible actor.

Okay, so maybe I did. But let's focus on the positive. When I saw the trailer for Gone Baby Gone, I was mildly impressed that it wasn't touted as being directed by BEN AFFLECK. I merely happened to see that it was directed by you in the flash of credits at the end. So I went into Gone Baby Gone with an open mind.

You took some pretty ridiculously melodramatic and emotionally manipulative story lines and skinned them down to the bare essentials, both thematically and aesthetically. Your choice to use authentic Boston townies and locales, but still inject a stylish tone that didn't over-glossify the film really remarkably balanced the awareness of Gone Baby Gone's placement as a genre piece with a realism lacking in standard detective fare.

And tell your baby brother Casey that when he tries, he can very successfully come across as sweet, troubled, and grim all with equal ease. If more people gave him risky chances like this, he could become one of the only truly versatile actors of this generation. Maybe working with the always brilliant Ed Harris helped him, maybe it was you. No, it was probably Harris.

But you, you stay behind the camera. And keep at it.

Semi-regretfully Yours,

Chris."

This entry was posted by chris, on Thursday, October 25, 2007. You can leave your response.