Word: afflecks
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...Whenever Joel is stymied by Suzie's sweatpants, he ends up at the sports bar at the nearby Marriott, the aptly named Sidelines, where his old pal Dean (Ben Affleck, shaggy as a bear) tends bar. Dean believes Xanax is the cure for everything, including the common cold. Their conversations head in absurd directions - Dean thinks Joel should hire a gigolo to seduce Suzie so he can sleep with the alluring Cindy guilt-free, a suggestion that ultimately does more damage than Cindy does - but at the same time have a real naturalism. Imagine Pulp Fiction's Jules and Vincent...
...appeal of its stars with an intelligent plot and worthy characters. At the center of the movie is Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), a seasoned reporter for The Washington Globe who begins to unravel a government conspiracy while investigating the death of a research assistant to Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck)—coincidentally Cal’s friend and college roommate. Accompanied by Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), a young but eager political blogger for The Globe, Cal discovers that at the center of the plot is PointCorp, a private company bidding for Defense Department contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan...
...settled in for a screening of the year's first big prestige picture: State of Play, a political thriller starring Oscar laureate Russell Crowe as a crusading newsman and Ben Affleck as a prominent Congressman whose career is threatened by a sex-and-murder scandal. This is my kind of cinema sirloin, organic and artfully prepared. Yet something in me anticipated leftovers. The film is a distillation of a 2003 BBC miniseries, also called State of Play; and I'd recently seen and revered that show. Not that the American movie couldn't have improved on the British series...
...pursuing what seems to be the all-too-routine murder of a drug dealer. Another Globe staffer, perky bloggista Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), is digging for sexual dirt attending the relationship of a Capitol Hill researcher, dead in a train accident, to her boss, Congressman Stephen Collins (Affleck). Cal muscles in on Della's story because in college he was close to the budding politician - and even closer to Stephen's wife, Anne (Robin Wright Penn). As Cal and Della form an uneasy alliance, they begin trying to weave a coherent pattern out of dozens of threads: Stephen's affair...
...Slovenly, with long, stringy hair, and weirdly resembling the adult film star Ron Jeremy, Crowe disappears rather ostentatiously into the role; he's like a hedgehog trying to hide behind a Ping Pong ball. Affleck puts his stiff affability to handsome use, and McAdams reads all her lines correctly. The showy role - of a public-relations creep named Dominic Foy, a friend of the murdered woman and a pusher of questionable corporate agendas - goes to Jason Bateman. He's most entertaining, in a squirm-inducing way, but lacks the preening, queening elan of Mark Warren, the BBC's Dominic...