Boy Movies #60

Dunkings, Cameron Crowe, etc.

Hello and welcome to the 60th issue (?!) of Boy Movies! Reminder that 🚨 Boy Movies stickers 🚨 are still available, and also that you can follow me on “Twitter” (I guess, I’m trying to be on there less, it sucks — the problem is that my friends on there are so funny!) and/or Letterboxd. Or not! Do whatever you want, we are on this planet for a mere few decades. Onward!

Elephant in the room: I did in fact take the last two weeks off without warning for reasons that I wish were mysterious and intriguing but mostly boil down to me being so tired. I was convinced I’d take this week off too until I saw the Super Bowl ad that I quite literally spoke into existence; there’s something sort of iconic about me doing that and then promptly signing off from this newsletter for good, never to return. But fortunately, or unfortunately for my haters, I’m still here!

This Is MattnBen…Now…Once Again

Well, the “Dunkin Donuts commercial” that Robert Downey Jr. scoffed about is here. It feels unbelievable to say such a thing about a Super Bowl ad for an American coffee chain, but I’m being completely real when I tell you that the Ben Affleck-Matt Damon-Jennifer Lopez Dunkin commercial single handedly inspired me to scurry into Google Docs and write these words you’re reading right now. I did not watch the Super Bowl because I am not a registered Republican, however I did tune in to see one of my longest standing crushes, Usher, be unbelievably sexy while roller skating, and I also had a minor meltdown trying to get “Title” to work when Beyoncé dropped her singles. But it would be dishonest to say that what energized me the most wasn’t this stupid commercial.

Where to begin? There is absolutely no way that the marketing execs who pitched this concept could have known what they were doing, and yet they have done something huge. This ad arrives at a crucial moment for the Affleck-Damon-Lopez ménage à trois, and the layers of lore on display are staggering, almost impossible in their depth: Matt being introduced as Ben’s “pahtna.” How obvious it is that Matt and J.Lo were not even remotely on set at the same time. Matt’s “arc” being about how embarrassed he is to be there, and being there nonetheless, because Ben called upon him. Matt’s meek apology to his sisterwife. The whole thing being cross promotion for whatever This Is Me…Now is (AN ALBUM???) which has the added bonus of confirming that Matt Damon is, in fact, aware of This Is Me…Now. Tom Brady and Jack Harlow are present and literally no one cares because they do not matter to the central narrative, which in exactly one minute of multimillion-dollar airtime becomes a complicated labyrinth of psychosexual intrigue. It is Y tu mamá también. It is Passages. And it is, of course, the year of the threesome.

Additionally, I found myself on the Dunkin YouTube channel combing through the behind the scenes clips, and this one feels so real that it freaked me out:

Why are you as two men giggling while on set shooting a Dunkin commercial? Which could mean nothing…

Okay I’ll actually talk about movies now

Until last summer, when I decided to watch Jerry Maguire on a whim one afternoon, I was completely unfamiliar with Cameron Crowe’s game. My only frames of reference for his work before that were that he let Emma Stone play an Asian woman in Aloha and the Say Anything boombox — not Say Anything itself, which I’ve never seen. Just the image of John Cusack hoisting a boombox over his head, something I knew about because everyone knows about it. At the behest of my mother I watched Almost Famous for the first time a few weeks ago, and at the behest of myself as I continue on my mission to become a Tom Cruise completionist I watched Vanilla Sky not long after. I have always considered Crowe a boy director because I consider most straight male directors boy directors until I have concrete evidence that proves otherwise. But as is usually the case when I embark on some silly project for the purpose of writing about it in this newsletter, I discovered it goes deeper than that.

It seems safe to call Jerry Maguire (a rom-com-ish film about a scrappy little man who loves sports and money and his employee Renée Zellweger), Almost Famous (a coming-of-age dramedy about how cool it is to be a fan), and Vanilla Sky (a deranged Cruise/Cruz [Penélope, of course] double-header that I was absolutely gagged to learn my good friend Paul McCartney wrote the title track for) boy movies. At first glance, Almost Famous seems cuspy because of how much women love it, but with its harmless and hard-working soft boy protagonist who gets to write a Rolling Stone cover story when he’s a teenager simply because his tenacity appeals to the adult men around him, it actually might be the most boy of the three. I could not stop gawking at the way journalism was portrayed here; you mean to tell me that fucking kid is riding around on a tour bus with Kate Hudson and being indulged as he asks inane questions like “What do you love about music?” while I’m over here worrying about SEO? Crowe has spoken endlessly about drawing from his own adolescence while writing Almost Famous, but of course the industry Crowe so idealistically came up within no longer exists. To a journalist working in 2024, Almost Famous is a sci-fi fantasy. There’s an enormous amount of sadness to that, but there’s a level of unintentional romance to it as well. 

Isn’t that fitting for a director who approaches his stories so, well, romantically? Crowe is a boy director because he loves making movies about intrinsically kind yet lonely and ordinary guys who seduce gorgeous women with their kindness, their loneliness, and their ordinariness — qualities that Crowe purports are very charming, actually. But Crowe is no cynic; as lonely as the men at the center of his films are, they manage to look at life with almost gentle sincerity. They love being in love and aren’t afraid to show it. Work might suck, but it’s only a matter of time until it doesn’t; Crowe imagines worlds where every man is just one significant experience from getting really good at his job. His films border on twee but deal with a mature enough caliber of emotion to tip them into adult territory. The “Tiny Dancer” scene in Almost Famous is euphoric because it’s about music as connection, as a healing property. And if a line like “You complete me” seems corny now, it’s worth remembering that Crowe himself is the one who brought it to us without so much as a cheeky wink. There’s even a certain beauty to the romance in the otherwise cuckoo Vanilla Sky: In a world with no rules, why shouldn’t Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz fall in chaste love at first sight?

There’s a misconception that real boy movies must take themselves seriously (see the Barbenheimer discourse, which has officially reached its mutated final boss form). If Almost Famous has a dated view of journalism, its earnestness feels a bit dated too. But as the state of the entertainment industry grows increasingly bleak and cynical, indulging in the feelings Crowe so badly wants you to indulge in, just for a couple of hours, doesn’t feel like such a bad thing at all.

• This is old, whatever, but I reviewed Masters of the Air over on TV Guide if you’re curious about my thoughts on a show that’s been out for weeks.