Here’s Ben Affleck on Tuesday leaving his hotel in New York with Lindsay Shookus and then at the airport, presumably heading back to LA after spending the weekend with her. As Sarah just wrote in the previous post, it’s looking more and more like Ben will no longer be Batman. That whole situation is f-cked. Like when she sent me the story last night, I started questioning whether or not I actually knew how to speak English because I couldn’t make any sense of the situation at all. Two Joker movies and two Batmans but not connected but sort of connected? Is Adam Sandler involved in this? That’s the only explanation. Actually, no. There’s another explanation for why all of this is so sloppy. Because Ben Affleck, lately, has been nothing but sloppy. Sloppy seems to be following him around. Is sloppy becoming his signature?
I can’t stop hitting this point because it’s so frustrating to me. It should be frustrating to everyone. When someone like Ben Affleck, who has all the talent and all the opportunity, keeps setting himself up for failure, it’s almost…rage-inducing. Because it’s not like he doesn’t know how to get it right. He’s gotten it right before – more than once. Staying right is Ben’s problem. And if it’s this maddening as an observer, I imagine it’s distractingly maddening to those close to him. And, most importantly, for Ben himself. He would not be Batman if he hadn’t previously been Daredevil. He has spoken candidly about how disappointing the entire Daredevil experience was for him. It was a disappointment that he carried with him until the Batman opportunity came along. Here he was being given a chance to not only fulfill a childhood dream – be the Batman! – but to correct the mistake that he could never get over. To show everyone that he could step into a superhero suit and not f-ck it up. Did he want it too bad? Did wanting it so bad override his other instincts? Remember Ben, along with Matt Damon, was part of Project Greenlight. The whole point of Project Greenlight was to see a production through from beginning to end, to learn the work that goes into the process. This is work that Ben’s been doing for 25 years. He didn’t come into the Batman experience with no experience. I wonder though if he came into with so much want that he wasn’t able to recognise what he would need to make it succeed.
