The nepo siblings who exceeded their siblings

A Real Pain is a film about the fraught relationship between cousins, whose dynamic is colored by mutual envies and resentments.

However, there's good reason to believe the material might have some real-world resonance for one of the co-leads, Kieran Culkin, with regards to not his real cousin, but his real older brother.

Without really parsing the finer details of the history I can't say this for sure, but I suspect there is no way Kieran Culkin has a career if not for the path in Hollywood paved by his older brother Macaulay, two years his senior and the breakout star of Home Alone in 1990, the year Macaulay was turning 10 and Kieran 8. They're now 44 and 42. 

Now, this may not be an entirely fair theory because Kieran was also in Home Alone. However, while that was Kieran's first role, it was Macaulay's seventh, including the prominent films Uncle Buck and Jacob's Ladder. There's little doubt that Macaulay was, initially, the star, and Kieran rode his coattails.

Nowadays, when we see Macaulay, we look at him with the sort of pity we reserve for a person whose career never really took off the way we expected it to, and whose life featured some hardships we would not wish on him. We probably shouldn't really pity him, as he has indeed continued to have professional work (though you might be hard-pressed to name it) and has also been in relationships with beautiful actresses (once Mila Kunis and now Brenda Song). Not that we should judge the success of a person's life by the attractiveness of his partners, but if we are already using the fairly superficial standard of the prominence of his professional work, that assessment is in the same qualitative boat.

Kieran? Well he's just one of the most respected actors of his age group working today, star of Succession and a number of high-profile films (including A Real Pain) that have earned him an endless number of breathless and deserved accolades from critics. And if we're remaining shallow, he's also married to a beautiful woman, she just doesn't happen to be otherwise famous.

I have to wonder what the nature is of Kieran's and Macaulay's relationship, though it might not be a simple binary dynamic since their acting family also includes the considerably younger Rory Culkin, who's only 35 and has had a successful career in his own right. I have to wonder if Macaulay is jealous of Kieran's success and is always thinking "You wouldn't be here without me," or if there are even jealousies in the other direction, in that Kieran may never have a role as iconic as Kevin McAllister no many how many awards he may one day win. 

It mirrors the shifting relationship between David and Benji Kaplan in A Real Pain, where we are never sure which one has more reason to be jealous of the other, or which one is the real "pain" referenced in a title that is already playing double duty in that it's also alluding to the exploration of their Jewish heritage in Poland, including a visit to a concentration camp. It's one of the most successful aspects of a movie that surely did not work as well for me as it did for some people.

In the title of this post I referred to "nebo siblings," plural, and sure enough, I've got more where this came from.

A few years after Macaulay Culkin's prime, one of the next biggest child stars -- in other words, child stars whose names we knew beyond "that kid from that movie" --- was Dakota Fanning, whose big breakout was harder to pinpoint, though she was everywhere in the mid-2000s. I always think of her as showcasing her abilities most memorably in War of the Worlds in 2005. 

Today? The Fanning you want to talk about is Elle, four years her sister's junior, whose craft is respected far and wide, and who seems to make only good decisions about the roles she takes. Meanwhile, Dakota is left with dubious crap like The Watchers, in which the abilities she once showed in a film with some thematic similarities, the aforementioned War of the Worlds, seem to have abandoned her entirely. 

Then you have perhaps the most prominent example of this, where the younger sibling is on the A list and her older sisters are on the D or D- list. Twins Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen took the world by storm as the cute youngest daughter on Full House, a role they shared because that was a smart way to ensure you had one small child who was giving you usable material on any given day you were trying to shoot. (And something about child labor laws as well.) They became some of the first influencers as we now think of them, as well as tabloid mainstays. However, their own careers in TV and movies quickly petered out, and there to replace them was younger sister Elizabeth, three years their junior, who has morphed into one of the most recognizable actresses working in Hollywood with her role in the MCU and other high-profile projects. What's more, whereas they always seemed shallow and insipid, Elizabeth is the epitome of the kind of style and grace and glamour that they surely would have aspired to for themselves.

Then you have examples of actors who have achieved similar levels of fame, but the younger one is just so much more respected, at least as an actor, than the sibling whose work gave him the chance. Ben Affleck was appearing on screen for seven years before his younger brother Casey had his first role, and though it would be difficult to say that Casey has eclipsed him in terms of fame -- that's surely not the case -- Casey is far more lauded than his older brother as an actor. And though Ben has to be happy with all he's accomplished both in front of and behind the camera -- don't forget that a film he directed won best picture -- you know he wanted Casey's accolades as a performer, which include his own statue for best actor. Ben may have actually won this one, at least in the short term, as the #metoo related accusations against Casey have relegated him to less prominent roles in recent years, despite his evident ability. He's a bit of a James Franco in that way. (Though it hasn't stopped him from appearing in two of my #1 movies in the last decade.)

If this were the sort of post where I just kept on listing all the examples I could think of, I could probably come up with more. But I think four is a good place to stop for today.

The larger topic to chew on is just what it means for these people who have been eclipsed, for their psyche as actors and for their role as a supportive family member to their sibling. I think specifically here of Dakota Fanning, who was not just a famous face (like the older Culkin and the older Olsens) but actually considered sort of a phenom for her abilities as an actor, more like a Haley Joel Osment than a Culkin or Olsens. (And Osment might be an interesting inclusion in this post if there were any evidence to suggest his younger sister Emily -- the first siblings here to cross gender lines -- had actually eclipsed him in a meaningful way.) I have to think that Dakota feels an especial resentment toward the more talented Elle, because she appears to have done less than just tread water while her sibling swam ahead, if we are looking only at her abilities within the field that made her famous. She appears to have actually lost ground -- or started drowning, if we want to keep our metaphors in the water.

All this said, all the eclipsed siblings listed here are still working in some way. Even the Olsens, who officially retired from acting nearly 15 years ago, are still successful American businesswomen in the fashion industry, not has-beens living in a ramshackle apartment in Reseda, pining away for the fame and glory that once was.

If even someone as dubious as Pamela Anderson can be getting acting accolades from the critical community, don't count out any of these older siblings from one day rising up again and re-surpassing their younger nepo siblings. 

A complete inventory of multiple-time #1 people

As I continue to march along in my year of looking back at previous #1s, I've gotten serious about something I used to just track informally.

If you've been following me over the years, you probably know that my 26 #1 movies dating back to when I started this in 1996 have never featured a repeat director. Twenty-six different men and women (and in one instance, a combination of one of each) have been responsible for directing my 26 #1s.

However, that's not to say there are no individual people who have contributed to more than one #1 -- even a director, though he was not the director in his other top finisher(s).

Each year I notice if a new person has joined this illustrious group, usually mentioning it in one of my wrap-up posts. For example, last year I anointed Casey Affleck, who had starred in that year's #1, Our Friend, as well as 2017's #1, A Ghost Story. (Only later, as my repeating viewings of my #1s got going this year, did I realize Affleck is actually in a third #1, Hamlet (2000), very briefly -- making him the second person to be involved with three different #1 movies, and the first to appear on screen in three different ones.)

To this point, though, I've only been keeping track of this casually, in my head. Well, for a list-maker like myself, such informality cannot stand -- especially since it meant I was likely missing some people. And true enough, I was, as we shall see.

So what I did was pull up an Excel spreadsheet and start recording significant contributors to each of my #1 movies, starting with Looking for Richard in 1996 and going all the way through to Our Friend. "Significant," in this case, is defined as the following: 1) the top five to ten actors, or possibly more, depending on the size of the ensemble; 2) any other actors who appear in the cast whose names I recognize; 3) the director; 4) the screenwriter; 5) the names of any producers I recognize; 6) the composer; 7) the cinematographer; 8) the editor. And in one case, the casting director, though I don't expect that to be a regular thing. (Yes, Mary Vernieu has reached the point of ubiquity that once prompted me to write this post about Avy Kaufman.)

"But Vance," you say. "Can you really describe the contributions of Casey Affleck to Hamlet as 'significant'? The guy has no dialogue and appears on the covers of magazines and newspapers more than there is any actual footage of him."

Good question. And the answer is no, Affleck's work on Hamlet is not significant. However, I am not, technically speaking, trying to quantify the value of the contribution here. I am just trying to find a way to limit the people I'm looking at in IMDB to a manageable crowd, so this Excel spreadsheet is not a thousand names long. This group is the ultimate example of getting in on technicalities, and I'll include anyone who I notice is in more than one of these films. But I'm not going to comb the list of art directors and costume designers and key grips and dolly grips to be completist here. I'm already pretty close to completist as it is, going just on the names I've chosen to examine for each film.

Adding the identifiable "significant contributors" to each film didn't produce a list of a thousand names, but it did give me 336, for an average of 12.9 per movie. 

Now, there are some #1s that just have no chance of having any repeat contributors. Out of those 26 films, five are foreign/non-English speaking films. Only two of those are from the same country, Run Lola Run and Toni Erdman, though they are 18 years apart and TE is actually a co-production of multiple countries, not just Germany. And true enough, those movies did not have any contributors in common with any other film, just as A Separation, Beyond the Hills and Parasite had no contributors in common with any other film. I dutifully recorded between five and ten contributors for each movie anyway, given the possibility that these people might be involved in future #1s. 

It ended up being an interesting exercise indeed, and revealed as many as five multiple-timers I had not previously identified. (I say "as many as" because there was one where I couldn't remember if I had noticed him before or not.) I'll get into some stats afterward, but here are the 17 people who have worked on more than one #1, listed in the order in which their second film was chosen by me as a #1. And as you will see, two of them had a third in the offing.

1. Carter Burwell - Hamlet (2000) (composer), Adaptation (2002) (composer)

2. Lance Acord - Adaptation (2002) (cinematographer), Lost in Translation (2003) (cinematographer)

2. Bill Murray - Hamlet (2000) (actor), Lost in Translation (2003) (actor)

4. Jane Adams - Happiness (1998) (actor), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (actor)

4. Charlie Kaufman - Adaptation (2002) (writer/producer), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (writer/producer), I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) (director/writer/producer)

4. Kate Winslet - Titanic (1997) (actor), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (actor)

7. Clive Owen - Gosford Park (2001) (actor), Children of Men (2006) (actor)

8. Maryse Alberti - Happiness (1998) (cinematographer), The Wrestler (2008) (cinematographer)

9. Clint Mansell - The Wrestler (2008) (composer), Moon (2009) (composer)

9. Kevin Spacey - Looking For Richard (1996) (actor), Moon (2009) (actor)

11. Paul Dano - There Will Be Blood (2007) (actor), Ruby Sparks (2012) (actor/producer)

12. Emmanuel Lubezki - Children of Men (2006) (cinematographer), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) (cinematographer)

13. Kyle MacLachlan - Hamlet (2000) (actor), Inside Out (2015) (actor)

13. Paula Pell - Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) (actor), Inside Out (2015) (actor)

15. Casey Affleck - Hamlet (2000) (actor), A Ghost Story (2017) (actor), Our Friend (2021) (actor)

16. Ethan Hawke - Hamlet (2000) (actor), First Reformed (2018) (actor)

17. Christine Vachon - Happiness (1998) (producer), First Reformed (2018) (producer)

Yes there are a few problematic names in that list -- more problematic than Affleck is of course Kevin Spacey, less problematic (to this point) is Bill Murray. But this list is not based on merit as viewed through a 2022 lens. It's just statistics.

Let's start with the people that this process uncovered:

Lance Acord - I wasn't really familiar with this cinematographer -- I've probably seen the name before -- and it turns out he shot two of my #1s.

Maryse Alberti - You could fill in almost the exact same description for Alberti as for Acord, except swap out the pronoun "he" for "she."

Kyle MacLachlan - I couldn't actually remember if I'd previously noticed this one, so I am including him here just to be sure.

Paula Pell - I wouldn't have noticed this one at all, if Pell hadn't appeared in consecutive #1s and I happened to notice her name in the cast of Birdman, just moments before I noticed it in the cast of Inside Out. Her contributions in both films are minuscule, but hey, as I said earlier, every contribution counts. 

Christine Vachon - I wouldn't have noticed this either if I were not already familiar with her name. Apologies to other producers whose names I don't know, who may have produced more than one of these films. (Given that IMDB lists up to ten names for each film when you consider producers, associate producers and executive producers, it just felt too tedious to include all of them.)

Other interesting tidbits:

- Only three of these contributors appeared in consecutive #1s: Acord, Mansell and Pell.

- Only two English language #1s don't share a contributor with any other film: Hustle & Flow and 127 Hours.

- The most fruitful of these #1s is Hamlet, which shares five contributors with at least one other film (Affleck, Murray, Burwell, MacLachlan and Hawke).

- Kate and Rooney Mara are the only family members who appear in different films (127 Hours and A Ghost Story), though some do appear in the same film (the Coppolas in Lost in Translation)

- Longest gap between first contribution and most recent to a #1: Affleck (Hamlet to Our Friend). Honorable mention: Vachon (Happiness to First Reformed).

- Every role I identified has someone who appears across multiple #1s except director and editor -- and casting director, in which I only found Mary Vernieu in one film.

Random things I discovered during this project:

- Dominique McElligott, who plays Sam Bell's wife in Moon, is also Queen Maeve in The Boys.

- The Dardenne brothers produced the Romanian film Beyond the Hills, opening up a greater possibility of foreign language crossover at some point in the future.

- Doug Jones, who plays creatures in Guillermo del Toro's movies, was also in Adaptation. He plays the caveman in the section of the film where Kaufman imagines back to the start of time.

Probably another waste of your good reading time brought to you by The Audient -- but I had a good time compiling it. 

And I'll be really excited to see if anyone joins the list in January.

The sneaky three-timer, and other Hamlet rewatch thoughts

I haven't written about many of the previous #1s I'm watching this year as I've actually watched them, but Hamlet, my #1 of 2000, rose to that level for a couple reasons. If you're keeping track at home, it's the 16th of an eventual 26 I am rewatching before I rank them all at the end of the year, and it's probably the last before I leave on my 3.5-week trip to America a week from now. It also happens to be the next one that will get mentioned in my August monthly post reviewing my 2000 film rankings.

As I've been revisiting these movies I have previously crowned with my top yearly honors, I've also been reminded of the full size of the casts, some larger than others. You don't get a lot of other actors in, say, 127 Hours, but Michael Almereyda's adaptation of Hamlet with its all-star cast provides plenty of familiar faces -- and chances to see who might appear in multiple films I've named #1. That's another obsession of mine, each year trying to figure out who I can add to the two-timers list. My longest term obsession is seeing if the same director will score two different #1s, but that hasn't happened yet. 

Hamlet has two actors I already knew of who had appeared in another top film for me, those being Bill Murray, who also appears in Lost in Translation, and Ethan Hawke, who also appears in First Reformed. Last night I added a third, and for him, it's also a third #1 -- even if you can only barely count what he does here as "appearing in" the film.

You probably recognize Casey Affleck from the photo above, "playing" Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway in the original play, who has his sights set on vengeance for the death of his own father, which gives him something in common with the title character. In the play, if memory serves, he only barely appears at the end, never having factored into the drama before then except as an everpresent looming threat.

Well, he doesn't appear on screen at all in Almereyda's film, but he does appear in this photo on this news telecast, the last shot of the film, and possibly one other at the beginning, though I didn't recognize it as Affleck if he did. (By the way, that's Robert MacNeil of The MacNeil-Lehrer Report.) 

The reason this is significant is that just last year Affleck punched his card into this exclusive fraternity with his second #1, as Our Friend added to A Ghost Story to accomplish the rarefied feat. This "appearance" in Hamlet means he's at three, which, if I remember correctly, ties him with only one other person, that being Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I'm Thinking of Ending Things).

Is it a bit cheeky to count this? Sure. Affleck probably didn't even need to be on set. He only needed to give them permission to use a photo of him. It seems strange that they even used him, since he was only 24 and not yet widely known -- though his credits before this do include Good Will Hunting, To Die For and 200 Cigarettes among others. Tellingly, though, his role in American Pie the year before was uncredited, and only three years earlier in Chasing Amy he's billed as "Little Kid." Must have been a specific reason they used him, some connection in the cast, but a quick search of the internet did not yield it. (Though that search did remind me that Fortinbras appears in a few other photos, on a magazine cover and in a newspaper article I think -- I must have not been paying attention or thought it looked like him.)

One final note about Fortinbras: It's an avatar I have sometimes used, because it is roughly the Latin version of my own last name, Armstrong. 

Another behind-the-camera two-timer

There are doubtless collaborators who don't appear on the screen -- at all -- who worked on more than one of my #1s. Was the key grip on The Wrestler also the key grip on Moon? Undoubtedly.

The only ones of those in the past I've noticed are for screenwriting (the aforementioned Kaufman) and cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot both Children of Men and Birdman, my #1s of 2006 and 2014). These are the sorts of core behind-the-scenes contributors who achieve renown for the way their art transcends the anonymity of most of the names that appear in the credits. They're the kind of people who become known among casual cinephiles, whose work becomes a factor in getting you pumped up for a particular project. 

Well, you can add the music department to that. 

As I was watching the closing credits of Hamlet -- more on them in a moment -- I noticed that Carter Burwell did the music. If you're the sort of casual cinephile who doesn't recognize that name, Burwell has worked on most of the Coens' projects -- most significantly, in my mind, having composed the delightful bluegrass theme "Way Out There" from my beloved Raising Arizona, my favorite movie of all time. You know, the one with the hillbilly yodeling. 

He hasn't made it to my #1 spot working with the Coens -- they've never had a #1, though in retrospect Fargo would be my #1 of 1996, the first year I started doing this, instead of Looking for Richard, another Shakespeare movie. But he did get there through another movie: Adaptation. 

I didn't realize this until I went hunting through IMDB, sure that he would have scored some other #1 of mine but not being sure which one it was. There you go.

Speaking of music ...

The lingering impression of the closing credits music

In 2000, I remember really liking Hamlet as I was watching it ... and then being taken to another place by the music over the closing credits. 

The song is called "Greentone" by Accelera Deck, and because I can, I thought I'd include the song here so you can get a sense of the apocalyptic vibe that had such an impact on me:

The industrial percussive quality of this song makes it so ominous. It's like wandering the corridors of Hell.

I don't really know if I would have chosen another movie as my #1 without "Greentone." Probably not. But the music, such a perfect soundtrack for savoring what I just watched, made it a certainty.

And it's not the only time this has happened with a #1 movie of mine.

There may be others, but the one that jumps to mind is the closing credits of Toni Erdmann. I was already in a state of melancholy contemplation when that movie came to its close after two hours and 40 minutes, but then I heard the opening strains of The Cure's "Plainsong" start to play. Transportation city.

Here's that one:

Yep. I was helpless to consider any other movie my #1.

Does this make a lot of sense? No it doesn't. But there's certainly something to be said for the last audio impression a movie makes on you. I happen to know that the usage of Sia's "Waving Goodbye" over the end of The Neon Demon has a major impact on my thoughts on that film. Just this week, I was taken to another headspace by Birdy's "Quietly Yours" at the end of the brand new Netflix adaptation of Persuasion, which alone prompted me to elevate it a half-star. (Realizing after the fact that this song alone had been responsible for turning a 3.5 into a 4, and that some other critics had complaints about the movie that resonated with me, I demoted it back to 3.5 before publishing my review, which you can find here.)

So, memo to anyone out there who's making a movie: If you want me to slobber all over your work, just stick the audio landing and we'll be good.

Baby Blum

While scouring this film's credits on IMDB for this post, I notice another something really weird. If I thought Casey Affleck was too young to be thrust into the sort of significance his character has in this movie, what about the movie being produced by a zygote Jason Blum?

Blum was actually 31 by the time Hamlet was released, but the sort of industry-dominating career he would forge was just a twinkle in his eye back then. In fact, he's listed as an executive producer, which can be a sort of ceremonious credit, not necessarily someone who did the hard yards. However, it's only the fourth of what is now 217 credits on IMDB. The others are on a short and a feature I've never seen, though his debut is pretty impressive: In 1995 he was listed as an associate producer on Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming, another film I dearly love.

                                                             ************

Okay, speaking of ceremonious things, this is a pretty good halfway point post for my 2022 #1 rewatches project. It's more than halfway, which gives it something in common with the baseball season, also currently in its break for the all-star game -- a break point that occurs more than halfway through the season. 

This post is not just about Hamlet, as I have name-checked -- let me see -- 14 other former #1s in this post. I'm eager to see how I go with my final ten titles, to be resumed after August 20th, and how I end up ranking these 26 dear favorites. 

Welcome back from movie jail, Jason and Casey

There are two main reasons why an actor or actress might go to "movie jail."

The first one is obvious, which is that they did something shitty that we, collectively, cannot forgive them for, often times because they fail to take responsibility for it themselves. 

This is what happened to Casey Affleck.

The second one is more nebulous. It has to do with people losing interest in you, sort of. With reaching a certain age. With burning through your allotted 15 minutes and not being able to renew for another 15, for reasons maybe we can't even identify.

This is what happened to Jason Segel.

Both actors are back in the movie Our Friend. They should have been back two years ago, but after the movie premiered at TIFF in 2019, the pandemic happened. The release was pushed to January of this year.

I didn't real hear about it when it came out. Or maybe I did, because it was on my Letterboxd watchlist, but then I forgot I heard about it.

I remembered I heard about it when I saw it was available as the 99 cent rental on iTunes. This was almost a month ago. My 30-day rental was in danger of expiring.

Thankfully, it did not. Thankfully, I watched this remarkable film on Tuesday night. 

It's directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite. She directed the killer whale documentary Blackfish.

This is an entirely different skill set, and it's only one of the things I should write about this movie that looks at a man (Affleck), his wife dying of cancer (Dakota Johnson) and the friend who helps them through it (Segel).

But today I want to just welcome these guys back.

I don't know if I've forgiven Affleck. But he was on the very leading edge of the #metoo movement, which is probably the wrong way to describe it -- it makes it sound like he was an early adopter of something great. Instead, he was just one of the teasers for what Harvey Weinstein would bring fully into our consciousness.

I don't remember exactly what Affleck did. Something about holding a girl in a hotel room against her will. Not good. But maybe not unilaterally reprehensible either.

But he's always had the skills, as we saw in Manchester by the Sea around that time, and in numerous other films. He's ten times the talent of his brother, in any case. And for a person who tries to separate the art from the artist -- when possible -- I'm of the opinion that the art trumps, assuming I can't be 100% certain of what a shithead the artist is.

In the past few years, Affleck has worked, but it hasn't been regular. His most prominent performance during that time was as a detective in The Old Man & the Gun, though his appearance there might have as much to do with his relationship with director David Lowery -- who worked with him on Ain't Them Bodies Saints and A Ghost Story -- as any kind of indication of being welcomed back into the fold. There was also Light of My Life, The World to Come and Every Breath You Take, none of which I've heard of. Not a great slate for a recently anointed Oscar winner.

With Segel, it's been more mysterious, and I guess it's something like professional failure, unwarranted though it may seem. Since he received rave notices as David Foster Wallace in 2015's The End of the Tour, he's appeared in a misfire from a good director (2017's The Discovery) and then one other feature, something called Come Sunday from 2018. Fortunately he does also have two films in post-production, so maybe this is the start of a new stretch of regularity.

Life is messy, a truism captured perfectly by Our Friend. It's certainly been so for Affleck and Segel, for very different reasons, and in the latter case, reasons we may never be privy to. In a way, their recent lives have resembled their characters in this film -- Affleck a talented journalist who is absent and sometimes a dickhead, Segel a sad sack who can't progress in his career. 

I hope Our Friend brings them both back to us, so one can atone, and the other can just remind himself that he's really good.

The movies have missed them while they were behind bars.

Which backs get lashed

Having kept my love for A Ghost Story entirely out of print -- though if you had listened to this podcast, you would have heard me rave about it -- I was somewhat taken aback when the first comment to greet my year-end list on Facebook was the following:

"Casey Affleck should BE a ghost. Fade into nothing. Scare people when he pops up so they run away."

As this comment came within five minutes of posting, when I was still in that delirious high of publishing the end result of "my year's work," I immediately felt a pit in my stomach.

Was I wrong to look past the involvement of Casey Affleck in this movie in giving it my highest honor for the year?

I knew this person was not trying to be funny, either, despite her at least somewhat playful use of the extended ghost metaphor. This is a woman I have consistently seen post about #MeToo, who does not consider this a laughing matter. (I mean, I'd hope no one would consider it a laughing matter, but this woman most certainly does not.)

So I had a momentary crisis about whether I had failed in my responsibility to an important social cause in completely disregarding Affleck's participation in the movie as a relevant factor in assessing it. Should I so actively promote something that has a genuine creep on screen for much of its running time, even if he is behind a sheet for most of it?

I've written a number of times in the past about my general philosophy -- I'm sure there are exceptions -- of separating the art from the artist. I mean, I've seen Woody Allen's films every year for five years running now, which is almost certainly my longest such streak in the man's entire career. I believe if a movie has something useful to add to the conversation, or may be doing something interesting, I should see it and grapple with it, even if the person who made it is not a very good person. There are a lot of not very good people making movies.

But I must admit I did not even have this internal debate when it came to Affleck and A Ghost Story. I know Affleck was guilty of some shady things, some awful things, on the set of I'm Still Here. Women are right to be skeeved out by him, and men should be sure he does not go near their daughters. Still, and maybe this is just because I did not pore over the details of the accusations against him, I didn't realize he was quite as worthy of being loathed as the level he is loathed. Especially as more and more names have come out of more and more people doing terrible things -- in many cases, worse things -- the accusations against Affleck have further receded in terms of how shocked I feel I should be by them.

And yet this woman came forward with an implicit scolding of me for supporting an Affleck project, reminding me just how angry people are at Affleck -- at how they have pulled him out of what has increasingly become an indistinguishable noise about sexual harassment, and targeted him specifically for their hatred and scorn.

I guess part of the disconnect for me is that he just won an Oscar last year, and I kind of feel like people already knew these things about him when Manchester by the Sea came out, though perhaps I am off on my chronology there. I feel like last year would have been the time to punish him, yet "we" did not. "We" awarded him with the year's highest acting honor, because he was just so damn good. (A textbook example of separating the art and the artist.)

In fact, I find myself wondering if Affleck will be allowed to hand out the best actress Oscar this year. I'm kind of suspecting no. Though maybe it would actually be a better punishment for him to throw him out there and see what kind of reception he gets than to keep him out of the show entirely.

So it seems especially strange to me that A Ghost Story should now be bearing the brunt of a delayed disgust with Affleck. Is it because people felt like they could dismiss A Ghost Story as a twee exercise, not a serious film, whereas Manchester by the Sea was something they should more obviously reckon with?

But I also know that this is not an unreasonable viewpoint, or one held by only a few people. My wife has so far boycotted A Ghost Story because of Affleck's involvement (though I hold out hope that I'll eventually get to show it to her). Another person said to me, regarding Ghost Story, "I also struggled with Casey Affleck in it in a way I wouldn't have if I'd liked the movie."

So I guess Affleck can set you off on the wrong foot with the movie, or, if you aren't liking it, become "the lightning rod," to quote that friend again.

What I guess I wonder is why we're not hearing people go on rants about Baby Driver because Kevin Spacey was in it or rants about The Disaster Artist because James Franco was in it. Some of that may be out there, but I haven't seen it.

Granted, a lot of that has to do with the timing. Most people saw and formed their opinions of those movies before the person in question was revealed to be a creep, though I can't imagine people didn't have suspicions about Franco. Maybe the backlash for things can't come retroactively, any more than you can say "Ugh, you like American Beauty? How dare you, Kevin Spacey is in that." Though it does seem to be the case that the timing of the accusations against Franco played a role in why he was nominated for a Golden Globe but not an Oscar. (Not that nominations are actually done like this, but I like to imagine the Academy hastily switching in Denzel Washington, for his performance in a movie nobody saw and which is supposed to be bad, in place of Franco.)

Of course, I'm not the only one supporting A Ghost Story, so I have company in my failure to punish the movie for Affleck's transgressions. Two critics I like very much and listen to on podcasts regularly, Michael Phillips and Matt Singer, had it in their top three for the year, and in glancing at one of those websites that compiles best-of lists from around the world, I saw at least one other where it was at the tippy top, like it was for me. I suspect there are more.

Still, I can't imagine I can go into a new ranking year with the same blase attitude about whether the people I'm watching on screen are shitheads or not. #MeToo is too important to not pay it some heed. So maybe I'll just skip Woody Allen's movie this year. I'm sure I won't miss much.

More than anything, I hope this is no long-term blight on David Lowery's beautiful film, in which Rooney Mara is also a blameless participant deserving of much praise. A Ghost Story deserves to be a film for the ages, and I hope that the incidental toxicity Affleck brought to the project does not keep it from being one.

And I also hope one day I can show it to my wife.

The next Casey Affleck

When I saw the name Scoot McNairy in the closing credits for Killing Them Softly on Saturday, I thought "Okay, maybe I did know that actor who played Frankie." Except just because I could identify the name (it's a pretty unforgettable one) didn't mean I could identify the face. I still didn't remember how I knew him, only that I remembered reading his name recently.

It was only on the drive home that I realized that Scoot McNairy was also in Argo, in quite a different role. No wonder I wouldn't have recognized him, beyond a vague sense that he looked familiar.

In Softly, McNairy plays a lowest-guy-on-the-totem-pole hood who is hired to rob an illegal card game. The Dallas-born actor gives us one of those Boston accents that's authentic enough that only people from Boston (see: Affleck family) can usually produce them. In Argo, however, he's one of the state department employees stranded in the Canadian ambassador's Tehran home, a bit of a pipsqueak actually, though he ultimately asserts his will more than any of the other characters in his position. Still, it's a huge difference in overall physicality between the two roles.

But it's not just his physical appearance and range that cause me to compare him to Casey Affleck. In fact, these two roles suggest McNairy may exceed Affleck in terms of range.

What causes me to compare him to Affleck is that it's kind of a surprise Affleck himself was not cast in these two roles.

Killing Them Softly was directed by Australian director Andrew Dominik (hence the casting of the terrific Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, whom you may remember from his unforgettable role in Animal Kingdom). Dominik also directed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which starred his Softly leading man Brad Pitt ... and Casey Affleck.

Argo was directed by Ben Affleck ... Casey's brother.

The fact that McNairy was cast in films directed by two people who have a history with Casey seems to suggest that both directors were going for "a Casey Affleck type" in those roles, since for one reason or another they were not able to hire the genuine article. Or perhaps both directors didn't want to be so predictable or on-the-nose, Dominik feeling like he didn't want to return both leads from his previous film, and Affleck feeling he'd already made too many movies featuring his brother (though older brother only directed younger in Gone Baby Gone).

And though I once thought otherwise, being "a Casey Affleck type" is most certainly a good thing.

When Casey first emerged as a person I was aware of, a couple years after Ben became famous, I thought he seemed like a bit of a piss ant, a smirking, substance-free beneficiary of all that nepotism has to offer.

This was not based on any of his film work, mind you. It was an impression born almost entirely of my limited perception of his public persona, and I must assume it was based on something very irrational. I still didn't particularly like him in the small roles in which I saw him, but that's probably because they didn't provide him enough screen time to overcome my petty impression of what he brought to the table. Sometimes you just have an instinctive negative response to someone, you know?

But by the time he commanded the screen in the aforementioned (Affleckmentioned?) Gone Baby Gone, I decided that Ben's little brother had some serious chops. And I decided that maybe the thing I hadn't liked about him was what made him so different from his brother, whom I did initially like and like again now (let's forget about those intervening "dark years"). While Ben had classic leading man good looks and was on the path toward becoming a genuine movie star, Casey had the squirrelly appearance you usually associate with a character actor.

Traditionally, which of these two archetypes is the better actor? You guessed it -- the character actor, who isn't handsome enough to skate by on his looks, and therefore has to bring it every time. Which Casey basically does.

There's a place in this world for both Bens and Caseys, but if you appreciate the craft of acting, you are usually better off with the Caseys. To take it out of the Affleck family -- George Clooney is incredibly fun to watch, but if you want an award-worthy performance, you're probably better off seeing a Paul Giamatti movie. (I say this, of course, knowing that the current Oscar tally for these two actors is Clooney 1, Giamatti 0. Clooney also has more nominations and has also been nominated as a director and screenwriter. Okay, maybe I picked bad examples here.)

If McNairy's 2012 work is any indication, he could easily become the next type of actor producers would die to have in their movie.

"Get me the next Scoot McNairy!"