Truth in advertising

The first time I heard there was a movie called Valentine's Day scheduled for release (when else) this February, I thought, Hollywood has finally done it: Removed all pretense of trying to make us think we're buying a piece of art rather than a commodity.

This is the first movie I can remember being quite this naked about wanting to top the box office on Valentine's Day weekend. It would be like calling a movie Christmas or Fourth of July. They'll get close -- like Independence Day or A Christmas Carol -- but never just the name of the big box office weekend in question, flapping around there in the nude for all to see. Last year's I Hate Valentine's Day is a good example of dressing the title up with even one layer of irony/artifice/removal.

But nope, Valentine's Day it is. I should mention that it's far from the first movie to be called Valentine's Day. In fact, IMDB cites half a dozen examples from the last decade alone. But those movies were either made for TV movies, short films, or foreign films.

So Garry Marshall's Valentine's Day, the one coming out today, is the first one we can actually call out for being so blatant about its intentions. It basically says, "Look, honey, you don't even have to think about it. This is where you should plop down your thirteen bucks on Valentine's Day weekend."

It's even got the "a little something for everybody" approach mastered by He's Just Not That Into You last year, with a record fifteen (15) different familiar faces on the poster. (I have no idea if that's a record, but it should be.) If I didn't know this movie was supposed to be a Robert Altman-style look at a single Valentine's Day in the lives of a half-dozen couples, I might be tempted to call it He's Just Not That Into You 2. That number 15 worries me, though -- it's an odd number, so somebody's getting left out in the cold.

What's even funnier is that there are four additional names listed on the poster, who didn't make the cut for the finite real estate within that heart-shaped enclosure. That's a total of 19. We shouldn't be surprised to hear three of the four names that were excluded, as they are all over 60: Kathy Bates, Shirley MacLaine and Hector Elizondo, who may have appeared in every single one of Garry Marshall's films. (Jesus Christ, I wasn't kidding -- I just looked it up on IMDB, and they have sixteen (16) joint ventures.) The fourth name, Eric Dane, has reason to be pissed -- he's only 37, and is attractive enough that they nicknamed him "McSteamy" on Grey's Anatomy. His rivalry with "McDreamy" (Patrick Dempsey) just got a notch more serious, as Dempsey made the poster.

Other funny inclusions in the cast:

1. Julia Roberts. Damn, she must really have a soft spot for her Pretty Woman director. You'd think it would be Marshall who would owe her after Runaway Bride.

2. Anne Hathaway. Funny, because I likened her to a young Julia Roberts in my review of The Princess Diaries nine years ago.

3. Jamie Foxx. Really Jamie Foxx? I thought you were a serious actor now.

4. Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner. This movie is crackling with immediacy ... except that the two Taylors are now broken up.

5. Jessica Biel and Jessica Alba. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE.

6. Bradley Cooper. Hard to believe, but he's apparently the only one who appears in both He's Just Not That Into You and Valentine's Day, though doesn't Emma Roberts (bottom) look a lot like Jennifer Connelly in this picture?

7. Ashton Kutcher and Topher Grace. It's a That 70's Show reunion! By the way, I never like to pass up an opportunity to say that I hate Ashton Kutcher.

8. Queen Latifah. Since there are exactly two black actors in the cast, does that mean she's getting paired up with Jamie Foxx? Talk about tokenism.

9. Jennifer Garner. Wasn't there a time when Jennifer Garner didn't take every crappy romantic comedy that was thrown her way?

10. George Lopez. I just figured out which of the 15 gets left out in the cold. There's no Latina in the cast, so Lopez must be the lovable, asexual clown. Unless he's gay and getting together with Elizondo.

Anyway, I'm not going to see it.

Not until November, anyway.

Ha! Joke's on you, Valentine's Day.

Demanding to be seen

In a normal year, there was about an 11 percent chance I'd see a movie like Gigantic.

It was a small indie with a limited release in early April, albeit with a recognizable cast (Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, John Goodman). Even if it had been on my radar, which it wasn't, this poster -- going for a cool retro design, but ending up seeming kind of uncertain about itself -- probably would have killed my desire to see it. And rightly so -- but more on that in a moment.

In 2009, however, there was a 100 percent chance I would see Gigantic, for one simple reason: It was available on Showtime OnDemand.

OnDemand is the most organic tool available to me in trying to forge this random array of 2009 movies for my list that closes on Tuesday. It involves the perfect storm of randomness: maximum availability, minimum choice.

As I said a couple days ago, watching as many movies as I can from 2009 in order to rank them is kind of my way of artificially simulating the experience of a full-time critic. In my ideal way of envisioning it, this is a regular working stiff critic, not a famous critic, not the kind of critic who can opt out of seeing a particular dumb comedy or teen romance if he thinks it's beneath him. The kind of critic I'm envisioning gets assigned a movie and goes to it, because that's his job.

But with 95% of the movies I've seen this year, it's been my choice to see them. I've had to choose to go to the theater to see them, choose to rent them from Blockbuster, or choose to pick them out at the library. The notable exceptions, of course, are the films I was actually assigned to review, the ones where I had little to no knowledge of them before I walked into the screening room -- Lymelife, Death in Love, The Escapist and Soul Power were a couple of those titles from 2009.

And then you have the OnDemand movies. The majority of movies made available through OnDemand are decidedly second-run. They may be decent movies, but most of them are between one and three calendar years old. There are older movies randomly on there as well -- for some reason, one of the two OnDemand stations I have (HBO being the other) has been showing the 1996 George Clooney-Michelle Pfeiffer romantic comedy One Fine Day. Why that movie out of all the movies released in 1996? Who knows. It's a contract thing.

You'd think OnDemand would carry all the movies HBO or Showtime is playing at that particular time, but it doesn't. Or maybe it does, but HBO and Showtime just don't have that many movies from the current year, because there's a delay of a couple more months after they're first available on DVD before the pay cable stations start getting them. A few of the newest releases do creep in, however. And since that number is so modest and manageable, I make a special effort to see all of them, based on those two factors I described earlier -- maximum availability, minimum choice.

I started this last year, when films like George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, Over Her Dead Body and Definitely, Maybe entered my list of rankings based on this method. This year?

1) Gigantic (2009, Matt Aselton). A purely bogus film full of Sundance-ready eccentric quirks. I could give you a lot of funny specific criticisms that would make you laugh if you'd seen it, but since you probably haven't, I'll spare you. Suffice it to say that a bunch of kooky stuff happens with little interconnectedness, and much trying of patience. One of its most telling problems is that the title has no thematic bearing on the movie whatsoever.

2) The Uninvited (2009, Charles & Thomas Guard). Talked about this a bit a couple days ago. Uninspired, unoriginal ... well, you remember my riff on it.

3) The Soloist (2009, Joe Wright). This was actually better than I was hoping it would be. I did have some hope, since Wright directed the excellent Atonement, but the film was originally supposed to be released for the 2008 Oscar season, before being delayed to the spring, which is never a good sign. My wife had been a driving force to see this, so we might have seen it anyway, but we missed our chance in the theater. Its availability OnDemand made it a certainty.

4) He's Just Not That Into You (2009, Ken Kwapis). A film I'd planned to see on my plane trip back from Australia -- in fact, my definition of the perfect plane film. As I discussed earlier this month, its 130-minute running time took it out of contention for the plane, so OnDemand helped me fill that hole once I got home. And I actually was sort of charmed by this film -- falls into that same embarrassing-but-I-have-to-admit-it category as The Proposal.

There was one other film I was supposed to see, and actually started watching, but didn't finish:

5) Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 (2008, Kevin Rafferty). And you'll probably notice already, from the year I put in the brackets, why I didn't watch it. There's some debate about what year this film belongs to, and in fact, OnDemand itself put the year 2009 in brackets next to the title. But I have ultimately decided it's 2008 rather than 2009. It was released in some capacity in 2008 -- maybe only New York City. But as long as it gets more than a film festival release in a particular year, it belongs to that year, in my opinion. Two things ultimately helped me decide: 1) when I went to Rotten Tomatoes, I found a bunch of reviews of it by New York critics that were posted in November of 2008. The rest were in the spring of 2009, when it hit other cities, but the mere fact that the New York critics reviewed it means it wasn't just a festival release; 2) perhaps more importantly, the game portrayed in the film was in 1968, so it makes sense that this documentary would have been released for the 40-year anniversary of that game. So instead of getting into another situation like last year, when I included Taxi to the Dark Side on my list only to realize a few hours later that it didn't qualify according to our rules as we understood them, I decided to take the worry out of my hands by discontinuing my viewing after 20 minutes, and just postponing it to a time when rankings were not at stake. (Sorry Don -- you can rule as you see fit on this one.)

There may have been 2009 OnDemand movies that I missed back in November or December. After all, these films have a limited lifespan, then they disappear -- He's Just Not That Into You is actually no longer available.

Then again, that's all part of my perfect randomness as well.

The career makeover of Ben Affleck

There are a number of things that interest me about He's Just Not That Into You, which hits theaters today, in plenty of time to rack up word of mouth before you have to make your Valentine's Day plans next weekend.

1) Now that it's being released, does this mean I can finally stop seeing trailers for it? I swear, I've seen the theatrical trailer for this film about six times. And I'm not even going to movies that would be logical candidates to get the trailer, on the basis of their subject matter. So yeah, they were really saturating the marketplace with this one.

2) Speaking of ads for He's Just Not That Into You, I've broken my own tradition and included two posters for the same film with my posting. I've included the one with the nine (!) heads on it as part of some points I'll make later on, but I also wanted to include the one with the candy heart on it, because I thought it was a clever approach. Those candy hearts have always had the absurd role of making Valentine's-related prognostications, almost as though they were miniature heart-shaped magic 8 balls, so squeezing the self-help title of this movie onto one of them was a smart reference to our collective consciousness. (It's also a cheeky acknowledgement that films like this have no greater raison d'etre than to take a grab at your Valentine's Day disposable income). So I wondered: Could it bode well for the film in general?

3) Speaking of those nine heads, is this movie going to explode from diva overload? I remember the first time I saw the trailer, I thought, "Okay, it's a Jennifer Aniston movie ... wait, it's a Drew Barrymore movie ... wait, it's a Scarlett Johansson movie!" This is to say nothing of Jennifer Connelly, and I understand Ginnifer Goodwin is actually the "you" of the title. I'm not suggesting that any of these actresses has a really large ego or is difficult to work with on set, but I do think each of them (excepting Ms. Goodwin) is accustomed to carrying her own movie. How director Ken Kwapis is going to dole out enough screen time for them all is anybody's guess.

4) And speaking of massive egos ... have you noticed that Ben Affleck is a supporting character in this movie? Equivalent in stature to Bradley Cooper, Justin Long and Kevin Connolly, who have all made careers of supporting bigger names? This is what I really want to talk about, as you probably noticed from the title of this post.

It's tempting to say "Ha -- look how far Ben Affleck has fallen. He's almost an afterthought in an ensemble romantic comedy." It's especially tempting because everyone has gone through at least one phase of hating Ben Affleck. (Even those of us from Boston, who share his rooting interest in sports. If we never again saw his face in the front row of another Red Sox game, seeming to speak for all Boston sports fans, it would be too soon. Thankfully, Stephen King has basically taken that role from him in recent years).

And truly, Ben Affleck has deserved our hatred. After Good Will Hunting shot him and Matt Damon instantly into the stratosphere, Affleck's trajectory was initially far more promising. But while Damon made smart and often understated choices, Affleck went for as much fame as he could, even if it meant starring in Michael Bay schlock (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor) and ill-advised pairings with ill-advised girlfriend Jennifer Lopez (Jersey Girl, Gigli). What's worse, he didn't really seem to appreciate his fame -- he seemed to carry himself as though he deserved it, and he couldn't have imagined any different outcome for his life. Let's just say that when the market corrected itself, and Damon started getting recognized for his relative humility and intelligence, while Affleck began crashing and burning, legions of film fans cheered the scales of justice finally tipping the right way.

And then Affleck disappeared. Poof.

Did you notice? Did you happen to notice that in the last four years or so, Ben Affleck has been basically invisible? Except he hasn't really disappeared. He's been shrewdly remaking his image as a person who thinks about his choices, both in Hollywood, and in his personal life. In fact, you might say that his relationship with Jennifer Garner -- whom everybody has always liked, and whom Affleck didn't seem to deserve -- was the moment when the flip switched for Affleck. Right at the moment that most stars in his position would try even harder, would go even further down the wrong path, and would thereby reinforce all our negative impressions of them, likely resulting in total calamity and cinematic irrelevance, Affleck started to turn it around -- out of the spotlight and totally on the DL.

If you want to choose a rock bottom moment for Mr. Affleck, there seems no better choice than the disastrous Christmas movie Surviving Christmas, which had the singular indignity of being released on DVD in the same Christmas season in which it was released in the theater. How is that possible? It came out on October 22nd, that's how. Not only is that a totally obnoxious interpretation of the beginning of the Christmas movie season, but it also meant the thing was gone and forgotten by Veterans Day. Desperate to recoup any little bit of their investment in the film, the studio released it on DVD exactly two months later. I wouldn't swear to it, but that has got to be a first.

While movies like Gigli and Pearl Harbor seem like a much more symbolic indication of Affleck's downward spiral, anyone who saw Surviving Christmas (like I did) would recognize just what a low it was for him. Plus, it's also the last time we could really say "What were you thinking, Ben Affleck?"

Having worked on Daredevil with Jennifer Garner, Affleck married her in the middle of 2005, and things have been ever so slightly looking up for him since. (I have to assume they looked up quite a bit in his home life, but in terms of his career, it's been only slight). Around this time he made a movie that ended up going straight to DVD called Man About Town, which I did not see, and had a brief appearance in Clerks II, which I did not see, as "Gawking Guy." Since no one's ever heard of the first one, and since the last one was probably done as a favor to Kevin Smith (who helped get him started), let's leave them out of this discussion.

When I really noticed the change was when Affleck appeared in Hollywoodland, which I saw earlier this week. (It was one of two Affleck movies I am going to discuss that I first saw within the last week. Yes, I do my homework.) My first thought was "Ben Affleck is not the lead in this film -- how strange." (That honor went to Adrien Brody.) My second thought was "He's playing a guy who's already dead (former Superman George Reeves) when the story begins." Neither of these things seemed very Affleck-y to me. I was tipped off to something changing in the winds. And while I was actually disappointed in Hollywoodland, I do think it showed some new growth for the guy we assumed had stopped growing -- even though he's pretty wooden at times. A number of people seemed to disagree with me, as he won a couple very low level acting prizes, and was actually nominated for a Golden Globe. This was the fall of 2006.

In 2007, Affleck was in Smokin' Aces. I am going to eliminate this from my discussion because I don't even remember him in that film. However, I would consider it a step backward if I did remember him.

But then he actually put the brakes on acting altogether, and the movie coming out today will be his first acting role since then. Curious decision for a guy who had just experienced a comeback of sorts in Hollywoodland. I'm getting more intrigued.

The most obvious reason is that this is when Affleck decided to direct his first feature. And this is where he gets back a ton of the credibility that never seemed to fit him with his Good Will Hunting Oscar, which prompted some people to wonder how much of that script he actually wrote. Not only did he direct last year's Gone Baby Gone, but he also co-wrote the script. And this film, while imperfect in some ways, is such a startling achievement in other ways that it seems a feat of incredible maturity, especially for him. Not only does Affleck get Boston down perfectly in this film -- maybe we sports fans should let him speak for us after all -- but the way he gets down Boston is so much better than Clint Eastwood tried to interpret it in the over-acclaimed Mystic River. Unlike Eastwood, he didn't need to make up parts of Boston that didn't exist, and he seems to have an almost effortless understanding of the character types that populate Boston's seedier areas. The film is directed with an incredibly sure hand, and even though some of the character development is wanting, his brother Casey (a far more talented actor) really helps bring the movie home. (As does Amy Ryan, who was nominated for an Oscar for it). It would be a good achievement for a really acclaimed director -- for Affleck, it's downright astonishing.

And now this. His role in He's Just Not That Into You seems like an act of real humility. No, it's no great work of art -- without seeing it I can say that pretty assuredly. But for Affleck, it seems to say, "Hey, want to take a chance at liking me again?" Maybe it's baby steps back toward the old Affleck, the guy who might show up as the star of Transformers 3 in 2011 if he's not careful. But I don't think so. I think it's Affleck with his head screwed on right, willing to accept work for the sake of being a part of the industry he loves, not for taking a stab at the tabloid life he used to live. And maybe we have Jennifer Garner to thank for that.

I still don't love Ben Affleck. I still think he's as often challenged by acting as he is successful at it, and I still think there's something wooden about him. But I always like it when someone seems to recognize their limitations and live within them, while taking calculated risks -- like Gone Baby Gone -- which, if they fail, will at least result in noble failure.

If Affleck can keep doing that, maybe I really will like him someday.