Pages tagged “ben affleck”

You've just walked up to the podium in a daze. After bracing yourself for the disappointment that you've been trying to convince yourself you shouldn't feel, some movie star in a bejeweled dress tears open an envelope and calls your name. Now all eyes in the room—and in millions of living rooms—are on you, and you have to say something funny and something poignant and thank all of the people who need to be thanked, and the giant clock that only you can see is counting down, just like Charlie Kauffman said it would. It takes a special talent to deliver a memorable Oscar acceptance speech. Fortunately—at least for the actors—they're pretty good at delivering a great line. Here are some of the best Oscar acceptance speeches of the last few decades of the Academy Awards. Honorable mentions go to Adrian Brody for kissing Halle Berry and Julia Roberts for telling the conductor to put that baton thingy down. Click on any name to watch their speech in full.

10. Matt Damon & Ben Affleck - 70th Academy Awards
Before Bennifer, before Armageddon/Gigli/Reindeer Games, Affleck was just a charming kid who wrote an excellent screenplay with his seemingly 14-year-old friend Matt. Tipping their hat to Cuba Gooding Jr., the pair's youthful exhuberence is contagious.

Release Date: Feb. 6

Director: Ken Kwapis

Writers: Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo (book)

Cinematographer: John Bailey

Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Justin Long, Jennifer Connelly, Scarlett Johansson, Ben Affleck

Studio/Run Time: New Line Cinema, 129 mins.

He’s Just Not That Into You is a fiction film based on a non-fiction book of the same name, a book that aims to give some tough love and harsh truth to women looking for Mr. Right. But as I was watching the film I began to imagine that it was based on another non-fiction bestseller: Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. With anecdotes and pop science, Gladwell observes that experts of all types seem surprisingly good at making instantaneous assessments, using a mysterious reflex of the human brain to size up a painting in the blink of an eye, say, or give a job candidate a thumbs-up or -down upon stepping into the interview.

Ben Affleck’s full reinvention as a film director hasn’t quite happened yet, even though we retain fond memories of Gone Baby Gone from last year. He’s slowly begun to work back into ensembles roles in new movies like the American version of State of Play and He’s Just Not That Into You, but now Variety reports that he’s in talks to direct Arizona, a film about the slain Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles.

When we learned Josh Brolin would be playing George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's new film W., we were inspired to cast actors to portray some other American presidents. The rest, as they say, is history.

Maybe it's due to his practiced penchant for oration (sometimes successful, sometimes not), but Ben Affleck has been tapped to play an ambulance-chasing lawyer in Mike Judge's upcoming live-action flick, Extract.

Ben Affleck says he's filmed a TV report on the mounting central African humanitarian crisis to raise awareness about a conflict that has claimed the lives of four million people, with most deaths resulting from either starvation or pestilence. The crisis began in 1994 with an influx of refugees from neighboring countries.

Ben Affleck takes the director's chair to adapt Deenis Lehame's detective novel

Director: Ben Affleck
Writers: Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard (based on the novel by Dennis Lehane)
Cinematographer: John Toll
Starring: Casey Affleck, Morgan Freeman, Michelle Monaghan, Ed Harris
Studio/Run Time: Miramax Films, 114 mins.

Gone Baby Gone—much like Good Will Hunting—is a story about Boston. In his full-length directorial debut, famed Bostonian (and Good Will Hunting co-author) Ben Affleck highlights the class struggles, Irish pubs, gold-cross necklaces, grisly rooftop shootouts and unspoken neighborhood rules that still riddle the city’s south side. Based on Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name (the fourth in a series featuring private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, played here by Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan), Gone Baby Gone traces a joint investigation into the abduction of a four-year-old girl, with Kenzie and Gennaro working alongside a team of barking Boston cops (Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman). Affleck might not be the next great American auteur—he stumbles through character development, and Angela is so vaguely written she seems unreal—but Gone Baby Gone is capably directed, and its narrative is peppered with enough well-delivered twists to leave viewers satisfied.