Paparazzi alert! Get ready for some sightings in Austin of the Hollywood power couple of the moment — Bennifer, aka Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.
Celebrity gossip website TMZ (of course) reports exclusively that Affleck is renting a luxury condo in Austin while shooting a movie here. JLo won’t be “shacking up,” as TMZ puts it, with Affleck in Austin. But you can be sure she’ll be jetting in to visit her beau.
No word on where the temporary abode is — a downtown high-rise, perhaps? — but TMZ reports that “crews are already rushing to prepare the condo, bringing in furniture and setting up appliances.” Pretty soon, Bennifer may be “Texas two-stepping,” as TMZ portrays it, in their new pad.
JLo and Affleck recently rekindled their relationship after she and former professional baseball player Alex Rodriquez called it quits in April, ahead of their planned wedding. JLo and Affleck were together from 2002 and 2004. They met after being cast as co-stars of Gigli, a 2003 rom-com that bombed at the box office and now ranks among the worst films ever made. JLo officially ended her engagement to Affleck in 2004.
Austin-based filmmaker Robert Rodriguez is directing Affleck in Hypnotic, which is scheduled to kick off filming here September 20. Filming initially was supposed to start in April 2020 but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The action thriller will follow a detective who becomes entangled in a mystery involving his missing daughter and a secret government program while investigating a string of high-end crimes,” according to the Deadline entertainment news website.
The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.
Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.
After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.
It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.
One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.
Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.
Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.
Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.
