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Monday, January 14, 2013
 Golden Globes After-Party! Hollywood's Drunkest Night With Jodie, Ben, and a Thousand Other Thirsty Stars
By Grantland Staff

 On Jodie Foster's Not-Quite-Coming-Out Party
Cecil B. DeMille was an absurdly prolific showman-producer. He oversaw flamboyant biblical and pseudo-biblical pageants like The Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah, and The Greatest Show on Earth. They were epics of delirium and decadence that lavished the upside of sin, then sent you home relieved that the sinner isn't you. He manufactured dual celebrations of vice and virtue, vulgarity and purity.

There isn't much about DeMille that has to do with Jodie Foster. But the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the people responsible for the Golden Globes, named their lifetime achievement award in DeMille's name, and as the recipient at last night's ceremony Foster was less her famously reserved public self and more someone DeMille might have enjoyed: a contradiction.

For close to seven minutes, this famously intense woman went for loose spontaneity, yet seemed overcaffeinated and over-rehearsed and overprotectively honest. She opened her remarks with a reference to an old Molly Shannon character from SNL — "I'm 50!" — and talked about leaving her walker at home because it didn't go with her cleavage. She reminisced, vaguely, about her co-stars and her bond with film crews and then jumped into the heart of the matter. We knew it was the heart of the matter because she said, "So while I'm here being all confessional," even though, up until that point, she hadn't really confessed anything.

Foster mentioned that she was about to make her publicist, Jennifer Allen, nervous and said something about being "loud and proud" — and you could feel what this was building to and that she was going to go sideways with it, that she wasn't going to simply say she was gay because that would have been, what? Passé? Too obvious? Too much for whoever had ever wondered or whoever had already known that Jodie Foster is gay? This publicly serious woman whose best friends include superstar burnouts and pariahs, like Robert Downey Jr. and Mel Gibson, decided to go for comedy. And instead of saying "I'm gay," she said "I'm single."

She asked for a "wolf whistle," provided by Gibson, and then the audio went out, and it felt like the longest, most strategic f-bomb mute in the history of live television. But when the audio came back, Foster was still peeling the onion: This is not a coming-out speech. She did that "a thousand years ago, back in the Stone Age" — and not when she thanked her then-partner, Cydney Bernard, at a Hollywood Reporter breakfast, either, but way back when "in those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family and coworkers and then gradually and proudly to everyone who knew her — to everyone she actually met."

The assumption that telling the universe that she's gay would make Foster a Real Housewife or, in her words, "a Honey Boo Boo child," simply confuses the meaning of an act she volunteered to halfway perform last night. No one will ever confuse a woman as hotly rigid with intelligence and emotion as Jodie Foster with NeNe Leakes. We just won't. Nonetheless the live audience was moved to tears, while sometime during Foster's speech k.d. lang tweeted: "?" And the show's producers made an obligatory cutaway to a mildly perplexed-looking Jane Lynch.

Any frustration with this sort of point-making makes sense: Why all the defensiveness and self-torture at 50? There are 16-year-olds spearheading LGBTQIA groups. Taylor Swift would have released a dozen albums about what a lesbian she is and how she and Bernard had babies and broke up. But if Foster's need for privacy has a tinge of the pathological, it's crucial to remember why. She's a public figure whose concept of privacy and self-consciousness crystallized when a stranger attempted to assassinate a president in her honor. She's someone with some damage done to her, who, in her bond with Downey and Gibson, seems to identify with the damages of others. To Gibson, who sat at a table with her two sons, Foster said: "You save me, too."

We don't really know what Jodie Foster did last night, even though we kind of do. It was all a perversion of DeMille, giving us something that's none of our business without actually giving it to us. It was brilliant and cringe-inducing and sad and cautionary: Hollywood is so weird! It made you feel oddly closer to a woman whose astonishing screen self has wrestled with the perils of intimacy, who has always been, in one way or another, single. The contradictions are all Foster knows. This is a woman who comes out by simply Windexing the glass of her closet, then gradually lowering the shade.


— Wesley Morris

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Ben Affleck

Rasheed Wallace popularized the phrase “Ball don’t lie.” Well, IMDb don’t lie, either … and Ben Affleck’s IMDb page practically starts flashing, “HERE’S WHERE THE WHEELS CAME OFF!!!!” from 2002 through 2006. It starts with The Sum of All Fears (when he replaced Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan, to the chagrin of pretty much everybody), continues with The Third Wheel (I know, I don’t remember this one, either), Daredevil (the worst modern superhero movie ever made), and finally, 2003’s Gigli (a legendary bomb that wasn't quite as dreadful as we wanted it to be). That’s how quickly Affleck threw away an A-list career and squandered his much-deserved break from 1998’s Good Will Hunting.

Throw in Affleck’s prodigious earnings and his much-dissected romance with Jennifer Lopez and boom! Affleck became a public punching bag. Even back in Massachusetts, where Affleck and Matt Damon were idolized for being the “hometown boys done good,” the locals started griping because Affleck had fallen for a girl from the Bronx (Yankees country) while positioning himself as the face of Red Sox Nation. From afar, he looked like someone losing his way. Rumors swelled that Affleck was partying too much and gambling too much; on one particularly memorable Project Greenlight episode, Affleck looked and acted like a crazy person, as if he were playing the role of “The A-List Superstar Who Had Been Corrupted By Success And Was Headed For Rehab.”

Meanwhile, the steadier Damon had slapped together a more thoughtful career, choosing his projects carefully, mixing big-budget films (like the Bourne franchise) with riskier roles (like Tom Ripley), establishing himself as a legitimate A-lister, staying out of the tabloids, and basically handling everything better. You couldn't look at one without thinking of the other. If there was a fork in the Hollywood road, then Affleck went one way and Damon went the other. The title of Affleck’s Christmas 2003 movie seemed almost symbolic: Paycheck. Even after dumping Lopez, falling for Jennifer Garner, and cleaning up his life, his best-case scenario looked like television, maybe a starring role in CSI: Boston or something. Three more failed movies confirmed it: Jersey Girl, then Surviving Christmas, then something called Man About Town in 2006. Ben Affleck was finished. You can have two bad years in Hollywood. You can’t have five.

Except for one catch …

Ben Affleck decided that IMDb does lie. Over the next six years, he reinvented himself as a director. Who saw that coming? It started with 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, a quality movie that made everyone say, “Wait, Ben Affleck directed that????” Three years later, he proved it wasn’t a fluke by starring in and directing The Town. Last night, he won a Golden Globe for directing an excellent thriller, Argo. And look, awards shows are mostly ridiculous — just look at Kathryn Bigelow getting screwed out of an Oscar nomination for Zero Dark Thirty, or even The Tourist getting nominated for a Golden Globe 12 months ago. Just know that it was impossible NOT to be delighted for Ben Affleck last night. He thanked everyone from the movie, thanked his agent for sticking with him, thanked his three kids, then saved his wife for last. “[You’re] the reason I’m standing here,” Affleck told her, and when he said it, you believed him.

— Bill Simmons

The Evening in Sexual Nightmares