In Which The Era Of The Racially Progressively Gangster Passes

The Bloat

by ELEANOR MORROW

Live by Night
dir. Ben Affleck
129 minutes

Once you notice one major flaw in a friend, the rest generally come tumbling out. I knew a guy several years ago who made all his girlfriends get the exact same haircut. It was sort of like the haircut that Rachel got on Friends but with a touch of wretched abandon to it. None of the women involved presumably saw pictures of their forebears, and he did the styling himself. That same sort of creepy feeling radiates off Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck).

Besides this fatal flaw, Coughlin is also a murderer and thief. Besides those other two fatal flaws, he is a prince of a fellow. The thing he hates most is racism, and he is always fighting it, even though it is not even World War II yet and most of the people he meets in the progressive paradise of, ahem, Ybor City, Florida, also live very progressive lives.

After his first relationship falls apart, Mr. Coughlin brings two key people into his life. One is Mindy Lahiri's ex-boyfriend Danny (Chris Messina), who makes Affleck look like a handsome giant in comparison.

Coughlin's other friend is the Cuban alcohol smuggler who becomes his wife, Graciela (Zoe Saldana). She has the exact same haircut, as I mentioned, of the last woman he was in love with, but I would not spend too much time thinking about what these two people have in common. She is falling all over him with the sex — isn't Batman attractive? you will hopefully be thinking to yourself.

That is when I began to realize Live by Night was just an extended apologia/rehabilitation created by Affleck to make him look attractive to other women, since whenever the paparazzi insist on taking photos of him he looks more bloated than end-stage Marlon Brando. Ben was clearly disappointed that he looked like Chunk from The Goonies during the lengthy running time of Zack Snyder's Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

In Live by Night, Affleck dresses himself up in these amazing suits that do the service of making him seem svelte by virtue of old fashioned lines and tailoring that diminishes the weight he carries in his hips. The women of Live by Night are also completely hidden by swaths of clothes and fabric, indicating that this must be merely the custom of the time.

Affleck's character kills a bunch of police officers. He never shows any remorse for what he's done. Since his father (Brendan Gleeson) is the police captain, he gets off with a very light prison sentence. Coughlin heads right back on the streets looking for revenge on the Irish boss who betrayed him for schtupping his girlfriend (Sienna Miller, whose head is now a perfect circle).

For some reason Coughlin's plan is to offer his services to the Italian mafia. He asks the Boston-based boss of the family if he has trouble with an Irishman working for him, and the guy is like, no not at all. The important thing to know is that these men may be vicious killers, but they have avoided a far worse fate — being indicted on charges of bigotry or racial preference.

What a world. Coughlin agrees to go to Florida, and Affleck turns Live by Night into a buddy comedy for a bit. Affleck has never had much talent behind or in front of the camera, but sticking to Dennis Lehane's basic novel means he can get the pacing down all right. He tries to turn every plot he works with into a thriller, which is really not what Live by Night is meant to be. The events themselves aren't much — the entire program depends on investments in the characters, which Affleck flattens by making them seem like caricatures from other, better mob movies.

Because of his interracial marriage, the local Ku Klux Klan starts going after Joe Coughlin in a major way. He fails as a mobster since he won't expand his business to the drug trade after Prohibition ends. You see, Joe's moral compass permits the taking of human life, but not the enjoyment of the same.

Somewhere in here Elle Fanning shows up. Like all the women in Live by Night, she has no actual agency of her own and exists in the plot merely as a functionary whose death serves to propel various events forwards. No woman should probably ever agree to work with Mr. Affleck again based on these results.

Maybe a better performer like Joaquin Phoenix or (producer on this disaster) Leonardo DiCaprio could have carried Live by Night to something close to watchability, but Affleck plays Coughlin as an overserious lug — we never get the sense he is capable of the insight the lugubrious voiceover attributes to him. Moreover, Affleck's lower body and hands never seem to move at all, meaning Joe Coughlin might as well be a talking head ping-ponging through cinematic space.

Affleck's worst trait as a director is his prosaic and overly symbolic use of light. The way he puts all the morally dubious characters in darkness, obscuring the actual abilities of the talented performers in this ensemble is extremely distracting and counterproductive to our basic enjoyment of the story. Just go back to The Batman and leave these poor actors alone.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which The Immobility Of Ben Affleck Does Not Impact The Relative Distribution Of Justice

You Will Bleed

by DICK CHENEY

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
dir. Zack Snyder
151 minutes!

There is a scene in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice where Lois Lane (Amy Adams) has time for a nice long bath. She is one year past forty, an unmarried woman entering her second prime. Her prominent cheekbones and resoundingly high, nasal tone in her voice keep her looking roughly the same age as her boyfriend, even though he is nine years younger than herself.

Although she is a journalist, she does not spend very much time writing. Her skills lurk more towards the investigative side of the ledger; perhaps an intern even does the actual grunt work on her stories. "No one buys newspapers anymore," grouses her boss (Laurence Fishburne). She lives her life independently of the men in it: if one she likes happens to stroll in on her during one of her long soaks, she may spread her legs for him — if she doesn't have to catch a flight for Johannesburg in the morning.

The basis of her relationship with her boyfriend is relatively unconventional given that he is immortal. She is constantly concerned for his welfare, even though he at times seems impervious to physical pain. When a fat man (Ben Affleck) is about to stab her one and only with a green spear, she intervenes to save her man's life. I liked this, because we do not just have to assume how much she cares about him — Lois showed it.

The fat man has no love in his life. He can in fact barely move; the fat man's butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons) is clearly a more athletic person and practically runs circles around the overweight child he was forced to raise in the absence of any living family. Affleck did not do any of his own stunts, and here he verges on not being able to do any of his own acting, since he has only a few scenes where he has significant dialogue with anyone as Bruce Wayne.

In that scene he is sort of flirting with a model-type Israeli woman (Gal Gadot) who has made an appearance at a fundraiser. "You've never met a woman like me," she tells him, and his response is something along the lines of, "Would you be at all interested in babysitting my kids?" Jennifer Garner played a heroine in the mode of the young woman in Dawn of Justice decades ago, as the love interest of a not-so fat man (Ben Affleck) back when he still had flexibility in his knees. In Dawn of Justice Ben is entirely stationary — we don't see him walk more than two feet without a double taking his place.

On the set of that film Affleck would often suprise her with croquet or a brewski and ask her how she liked being pinched. It was a win-win for the not as fat man, because if she said she did not like it, he would pinch her. You know what happened if she said she did. (The dogshit movie that Affleck directed about a film crew had basically no women in it.) The fat man gets this look on his face everytime he sees a woman like he is glimpsing the gender for the first and last time, whispering away, sotto voce, "Can you believe this?"

Batman has a vision of the future. He is wearing an overcoat but still a mask. At first we can't help thinking how silly he appears but a new look is long overdue for this character and when we are snapped back to the Batcave, we feel a pending nostalgia for what we have witnessed. A time-traveler (Ezra Miller) warns the fat man about Lois Lane's boyfriend, so he decides to kill Superman until he finds out his mother (Lauren Cohan) and Lois Lane's boyfriend's mother (Diane Lane) have the same first name, which is Felicia.

The best part of Dawn of Justice is relatively early on, when we relive the moments where Ben experienced the destructive and murderous battle between Lois Lane's boyfriend and General Zod (Michael Shannon). He tells everyone that they are going to be all right, to be the point where he seems to be have a disturbed stress reaction to all the killing. Even a little girl gets this blank face on her face like, "You just told a guy without his legs that." It is fun to watch powerful people helpless and writhing like worms.

All of the people who are most upset about the hundreds of millions of dollars Lois Lane's boyfriend has cost Metropolis are black, and pressure from this community forces a senator (Holly Hunter) to convene a hearing. Lois Lane tries to explain that he was just trying to pick her up some Papa Johns on the way home, but the black people are contemptuous of Superman's claims on moral righteousness, perhaps being wary of the concept altogether. It turns out that the Israeli model Bruce Wayne met had a tape of a man living underwater, and this man was also an ethnic minority. He makes no further appearance in Dawn of Justice.

It is helpful to think of Superman like a vase. Preserved on a secluded corner table, it will not die of old age. If preserved, it is proof against time, it will never become sick or look differently outside of a few minor imperfections. But it could be broken, and in so being smashed it was capable of death before its time.

Overall I would rate Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice five stars out of ten stars. I would take one star off because there was really no positive role model of color in the movie. I took another star off because they pretended like Superman was dead, even though everyone knows that is not going to happen. I removed a third star because we never see anyone with their top off, especially not Mr. Affleck. I took another star off because the movie made no sense and had huge holes in its plot. I added a star because it seemed like Scoot McNairy and the fat man were going to kiss at one point, but then they kind of backed off. I took off a star because they digitized Batman's voice and he sounded like a male Siri. I added a star after the scene where Wonder Woman reviewed security cam footage like she was on CSI: Metropolis. I took off a star when Holly Hunter died. I added a star, and it went shooting across the sky. Men and women gawped, but not at the same time.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Make You Holla" - No Regular Play (mp3)

In Which Most People Enjoy A Convincing Eskimo Kiss

Spoilers for Gone Girl follow in this review.

Fresh Melons

by DICK CHENEY

Gone Girl
dir. David Fincher

Neil Patrick Harris' inclusion as the titular Gone Girl in this movie was entirely a tactic to encourage reviewers to begin their essais with those familiar words, "Susan Sontag, in her essay 'Notes on Camp'...

The series of shirts that Ben Affleck wears in this movie to cover the actual shape of his body was impressive; he looked like Mr. Fantastic. Affleck's character, Nick Dunne, is a creative writing professor who slept with his hottest student. There was no mention of the quality of her writing, but there was a high likelihood she penned the sentence, "His eyes were the window to his soul."

just another reason that sarah silverman's song about protecting your neck is more relevant than ever

I have rewatched the scene in which Amy (Rosamund Pike) slits Neil Patrick Harris' throat with a box cutter a number of times. It looks like the end of a College Humor sketch, and I would like the name of Ms. Pike's ass double.

You know what society really needed right now? A movie about a woman who lies, more than once, about being raped.

A strange time for a St .Louis movie about wp, but Tyler was there to liven things up. Hi Tyler.

Nick Dunne's mistress had it all. She didn't have to wash his clothes or his dishes or care for his tawny cat. He didn't even cheat on her. He taught her things, like the intricacies of the work of Andre Dubus III and how T.S. Eliot had a borderline inappropriate relationship with his mother. She lived in a nice dorm on a beautiful college campus; in contrast Nick Dunne's sister lived in pig shit, serving slop to basics at The Bar.

You know it's the past because books sold enough to have stores back then.

Death during sex is a timeless way to go; it is how I assume George Stephanopoulus will perish. He suddenly, in the throes of something or other, wilts like a leaf. If these people had gone to church I kind of get the feeling this never would have happened.

I always sob after my brother has sex with one of his students. Always.

Pike's character should have been on The Bold and the Beautiful. She wasn't much fun except when she was winning at miniature golf. Whether or not a man likes a woman with her own mind is really the point here.

Ben Affleck's recent meltdown aside, he is used to Jennifer Garner screaming, "These melons aren't fresh Beeeen." Shit like that gets a bit maddening when all you want to do is settle down with a glass of cabarnet and Marguerite Yourcenar novel.

Is he wearing a girdle?

The music here is the absolute worst. I mean they should have scrapped the entire soundtrack that's how bad it was. When Tyler Perry finally made his appearance and they took all of twenty seconds to set up the character, you knew there were problems.

This book would have been a lot better as a TV series, I don't know why they couldn't have milked it like a fresh canteloupe. Affleck and his incestuous sister could have exchanged eskimo kisses and adopted a dog together.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can visit our mobile site at thisrecording.wordpress.com

miss u casey

"Keep On Lying" - Jessie Ware (mp3)

"Champagne Kisses" - Jessie Ware (mp3)