With Boiler Room and Reindeer Games just opened, we will have a lot of new material on Ben posted over the next few days.
Casey co-stars with Danny DeVito and Bette Midler in Drowning Mona, a comedy about the murder of the most-hated woman in a small town whose only distinction is that it is where the Yugo automobile was first test-marketed in the United States. As you can see, Casey has gone blond for the film. It will be released in the next few weeks.
As we noted on our main page, Christopher Masterson came in first (by one vote!) over his brother Danny as your favorite star here, but we received so many write-ins for Ben Affleck, Ryan Phillippe and others that we had to re-set the survey counter to include them. If you want to vote for for yourfavorite actor here, go to the bottom of this page and click on the plea to the Muse to take you "Home" (ours, not yours!), then scroll down to the survey panel and recast your vote.
Note: 6 JULY 1999: Ben Affleck has slipped to a weak fourth place as the most popular star on our web site, preceded by Ryan Phillippe and by Ben Silverstone, who are jockeying for second and third place. We thought adding all of these major league movie stars would seriously affect the first place position, but with an astonishing 23% of the vote, Christopher Masterson has a commanding lead now. Either people really, really, got off on hearing Christopher sing with lungs filled with helium in My Best Friend's Wedding, and really liked Matthew Modine's short film Ecce Pirate, which stars Christopher and which the Sundance Channel recently replayed at our request . . . or SOMEONE out there has no life and just waits patiently to cast a vote a day for Christopher. . . . . Ya know . . . we've always wondered why we never hear from him; maybe he's glued to his computer waiting for the software to let him vote for himself again! Surprisingly, Christopher's enormously popular brother Danny (Steve Hyde on "That '70s Show") is in a very weak fifth position in this survey.
If you saw the MTV awards and were wondering who that guy was who was notMatt Damon, but whom Ben kissed so passionately in front of millions of people, it was Kevin Smith, Ben's good buddy and the director of Matt and Ben's movies Chasing Amy and the upcoming film Dogma.
We started this little page almost two years ago, and, after all of that time Ben has finally set up an official web site. We highly recommend it . . . despite the fact that they have not bothered to create a link to OUR page. (Hint, HINT, Derek!)
The American Film Market finally being over, we have something resembling a review of Ben and Casey's film 200 Cigarettes posted. Unfortunately, we never received any pictures of Ben as the Bartender, but we do have a picture of Casey with Gaby Hoffman, Christina Ricci, and Guillermo Diaz.
Ben has recently appeared on "Politically Incorrect," being very funny and insightful, and did a two-part interview for ABC's morning show. (Hmmm. . . . "Politically Incorrect" is on ABC, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, and most of Ben's recent movies have been released by Miramax and Dimension, which are also owned by The Mouse. Maybe there really is something behind the title of Ben's first directorial effort!) The official ben Affleck web site, by the way, has a RealMovie recording of all of the parts of the show with Ben.
Ben isn't totally owned by Disney, however, since Paramount released 200 Cigarettes and Dreamworks SKG is releasing Forces of Nature, apropos of which we must issue this warning: as our reviewer has noted for Ben's film Phantoms, when a studio won't send out press kits to reviewers, "it usually means that there is something seriously wrong with the picture and the studio knows it." As of 18 March, we haven't seen a press kit for Forces of Nature, which opens on 19 March. Let the ticket buyer beware. . . .
We refer you to the IMDb listing for 200 Cigarettes which stars Ben and Casey. You know that we hate the title, but someone here has seen it and signed a confidentiality agreement, so we can't tell you anything about it! We can, however, refer you to what's already on the 'net. We're suggesting that you look up information on the film, but we're not commenting on it. Get it? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more. . . . (15 December 1998: here's what we can tell you: 200 Cigarettes has been finished; the producers haven't selected a distributor for it yet; they are hoping for a release date in the Spring of 1999; we may get to see it before it opens and give you the dirt on it.)
Kirk Honeycutt has announced in The Hollywood Reporter that Ben is in discussions with Universal to do a rewrite of the script for their upcoming project Project Zero. There is a part in the film that Ben might play, but he, unlike his brother Casey is not "committed" yet.
Ben has commitments to do screenplays for Castle Rock Entertainment and, of course, Miramax, which has been "beddy, beddy good" to the Affleck brothers.
Thom Geier has reported in The Hollywood Reporter that Casey Affleck, Luke Wilson and Heather Graham will be starring in Miramax's film Committed, about a woman whose husband leaves her in order to "find himself." She then goes across the country trying to find him, too! Casey plays the woman's brother; Wilson and Graham are the separated husband and wife. The movie is filming in Texas; we don't know how it will affect Casey's schooling.
Please check out our review of Chasing Amy and an interview with Ben about the film. (Of course, Ben's views are totally askew!)
Ben having finally obtained a job with a real pay check, he has made Armageddon, right on the heels of Phantoms. Ben must be doing well to be able to afford to play in such bad films. Oh well, at least he can now afford to do nothing but independent, art house films for the rest of his life. . . (Of course, after we posted this nasty little jibe, Ben immediately went on to do Shakespeare in Love, and 200 Cigarettes, which . . . oh, sorry, we can't tell you any more about that one!)
Chasing trivia: For the benefit of you skeptics who NEVER believe us when we say that we know who is going to succeed in Hollywood, we refer you (again) to our review of (early) 1997's Chasing Amy. See? We were fans of Ben back when he was still "C. T. Granville" to most people (as he always, to some degree, will be for us). Just to prove it, here's a link to a picture of Ben in London; we know who he was calling; do you? Answer below.
O Muse With the Jaundiced Eye, take me home!