Coincidentally, we watched Armageddon last night as a family.
Gut reaction is that I can’t imagine choosing Affleck. Now to check IMDB. I guess the “The Town”, “Argo”, “Gone Girl” run makes it closer than I first thought. But still going Damon.
Top of the head Damon has way more memorable roles/characters for me. Bourne stuff is great, Oceans series, The Martian, Departed, Good Shepherd and a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting.
Armageddon is defintely in the trashy 90s movies that I still like/love category, I watched it quite a few time as a kid.
Slight edge to Damon b/c I think he’s gotten to do more fun cameo/character-actory stuff. Also, if we are including overall life as part of career I’d prefer Damon just because he seems to avoided some of the intense paparazzi nonsense that Affleck has gotten, and that stuff just seems miserable to me.
Matt Damon and it’s not remotely close.
At the 4 minute mark Matt tells the story about how when they were teenagers the younger and then smaller Ben jumped on a bigger kid who was beating on Matt,
It’s a great bad movie imo.
Affleck crushing Damon according to Hendon Mob
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LOL, Tubi also has Slipstream. That moment in the late 80’s-early 90’s when Mark Hamill was a budget action movie tough-guy before switching over to an impressive career as a voice actor. I’ve wanted to see this for a while, Hamill, Paxton, the guy who directed Tron?
Air (2023)
I couldn’t care less about basketball but I loved this. It’s a throwback to when some movies were made for adults and nobody has any superpowers. Great acting, great drama, funny parts. A total blast.
Grade: A-
Ben Affleck has been in some awesome movies, but yeah it’s not close for me either.
Matt also just seems like a remarkable guy. Remember that video where he went to bat for teachers? It was kind of his Bill Clinton vs Bush debate moment when the reporter challenged him on what he could possibly have to say for teachers when he lives the life of a movie star.
My favorite moment from his interviews is from when Graham Norton asked him what it was like to win an Oscar at such a young age.
Matt Damon didn’t win an Oscar overnight. He was already a professional actor at the age of 16. Even Good Will Hunting , the film that earned him his first Oscar in 1997 and catapulted him into superstardom, took five years to finish.
For him, his career happened in slow motion.
And then he won an Oscar and it changed overnight.
Speaking to Graham Norton on the titular show for the BBC, Matt Damon described what he went through that night at the young age of 27.
Matt Damon: “I remember very clearly going back with my girlfriend at the time. And we went to her house and she went to sleep — ”
audience laughs
“It’s true!
But I couldn’t sleep. I was just kind of still buzzing. And I was sitting there, and I remember very clearly looking at that award and thinking very, very clearly — am I allowed to say a four-letter word?
I literally looked at it, I was alone with it, and I said to myself thank God I didn’t **** anybody over for this. And I suddenly had this thing wash over me where I thought…
Imagine chasing that and not getting it. And then getting it finally in your 80s or 90s, with all of life behind you, and realizing what an unbelievable waste of your…
It can’t, it’s gotta be, you know what I mean? It’s not, it can’t be good enough. It can’t fill you up. It will never [do that]. If that’s a hole that you have, that won’t fill it.
And I felt so, like, blessed to have that awareness. Because I wouldn’t have known it unless I knew it. Like imagine figuring this out at 80? That would be how…
And my heart just like broke for a second. It’s like I imagined another one of me, you know, an old man, going like, ‘Where did my life go? What have I done?’
And then it’s over.”
Ben has a few movies that stand out as potentially better than anything Matt has ever made, but in total, it feels to me almost like Ben has to prove himself with every performance. When he’s good, he’s dynamite, but there’s no consistency. It’s not entirely his fault. Some reports say reshoots for Justice League were partly what drove him back to drinking.
Damon, however, has run the gamut with one successful franchise or another. I rewatched The Bourne Identity and was smiling as I remembered just how laughable Matt seemed when initially cast, even if not quite as much as Michael Keaton being cast as Matt Damon. But decades later and it’s considered a defining role for Damon and how action films were shot going forward.
I guess now is as good as a time as any to confess that I might be ****ing Matt Damon.
Fortune favors the brave
I really enjoyed Air as well. Way way way better than a 2 hour commercial had any right to be. I thought there were a few spots where they leaned into the 80’s aesthetic a touch too much, but if that’s the price we pay for that soundtrack and Affleck in those jogging shorts, I’ll allow it 
It was one of the most ambitious and inspiring commercials I’d ever seen right up until that moment.
But yeah, then I said, “…fucking crypto?!”
182 more bangers added to Tubi today.
Okay, mostly bangers. But I mean that part. Only a few in there that made me imagine myself as the buyer for additions to their catalog.
The Old Dark House (1932) was on Svengoolie the other night, I only half-watched it while doing other things, but it was interesting. This is a classic Universal Horror film that had been lost for an extremely long time and only recently restored. Looks incredible in the way movies from this studio do, the sets and cinematography are classic, big recommend if you like other Universal Horror movies from the era, it’s slow-paced by modern standards for sure. Karloff doesn’t have any lines, which sucks because he’s amazing at delivering lines, but he’s still serving up terrifying looks.
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Primal (2019)
Ah man, it’s been way too long since I treated myself to a proper Nic Cage movie, and here he is at his cigar-chomping, beer-swinging, dad bod-rocking best. We find Nic transporting his collection of exotic predatory CGI animals overseas when an escaped federal convict gets loose on the boat. Of course my boy Nic knows how to handle a classic Con-Boat situation, of course he’s not going to hurt any of the animals running lose on the ship, of course the cook who has an inexplicable hatred of monkeys is going to get eaten alive by monkeys. This movie whips, it got kind of lost in the whirlwind of excellent recent Cage movies, but it’s a return to form for Cage and a throwback to the kind of dumb low-concept action movies I grew up watching. I take it back about the dad bod, Nic Cage does some legit physical performances here, he’s putting work in.
I give it 4/5 Cages.
