Ben and Matt in January

A trailer for Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, premiering on Netflix next week, was released yesterday. The movie stars Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Steven Yeun, and Teyana Taylor and as Sarah noted back in September, it’s a cool looking action heist (this combination of talent generally can be counted on to tell an entertaining story) and it’s a bummer that it’s coming out in January.

It used to be that a January movie was a bad movie. Streaming changed all that, to the point where two actual award-winning movie stars, Ben and Matt, are collaborating – always noteworthy – on a project that’s coming out this month that isn’t something that a studio just wants to bury. To quote Sarah, “traditional distributors won’t take chances on films like The Rip anymore” and I’m not sure there’s an upside to this for the industry. But that only makes non-franchise non-superhero original movies that play well in theatres that much more remarkable, like Sinners.

Promotion for The Rip is now underway and Ben was at Jimmy Kimmel Live! last night for a pretty routine interview. Since it’s award season, he and Jimmy talked about the Argo Oscar campaign, revisiting The Snub, when he was left off the nomination list for best director for a film that went on to win Best Picture. And specifically what it was like to be at the Critics Choice Awards right after the nominations came out and everybody felt sorry for him. He’s talked about this before, there’s nothing new here, but I do appreciate, always, his willingness to even admit that, well, celebrities at all levels of fame, and even the highest levels of fame, they want and crave the recognition even though so many of them pretend not to.

It's especially interesting now, to go back to that conversation about how streaming has disrupted so much of the entertainment business, and yet there are some legacy markers of success that continue to retain the prestige. Sure, traditional audience metrics for Oscar viewership are lower but the Oscar is an award that everyone, even the kids, are aware of and assign value to – the highest value. Like trust me, all of them, still, would rather win an Oscar than whatever video game award or livestreaming twitching trophy.

But enough about the awards and accolades, Ben and Matt actually participated in an interview recently that gave me a peg to address something I haven’t been able to rant about. It’s to do with that time Ben refused to wear a Yankees cap in Gone Girl and he and David Fincher had an argument about it.

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You can read more about the great cap debate in this 2014 piece in the NYT. Ben and Matt are famously from Boston. Ben and Matt are also famous actors who play characters – their job, supposedly, is to not be themselves. And yet Ben was making a decision for his character based on his own personal experience and aversion to anything related to his hometown rival baseball team. He ended up in a Mets cap instead.

I would really like to eyeroll Ben here but that would make me a hypocrite because even though I’m not an actor, if I were asked to wear a Yankees cap, or a Dodgers cap, or rep any North American city other than Toronto or Vancouver, I would strongly want to decline. And it goes beyond sports – this is a thing for me where clothing labelling is concerned. There are so many times I’ve seen a sweater or a perfect crewneck with the perfect slouch and have put it down because it has “Los Angeles” splashed across it. Or “New York”. Or “Miami”. If I were from those places or lived in those places, sure, but since I’m not, there are only two towns in North America, and probably broader, to include Europe, where I would put their names on my body. Is it just me? Let’s take this over to The Squawk today – join us to discuss further. (App link here.)