For the love of God, don't Affleck yourself!

Definition taken from the Your Pal Lexiconograph:
Affleck-v. -ed -ing 1. to wildly stretch beyond the established bounds of your talents, from American actor Benjamin Geza Affleck.

Typecasting is quite the slippery slope, for the waiter/actors that are currently doing more waiting than acting just having a role memorable enough for people to have any opinion of you is an unfulfilled dream, but actors that are typecast bitch an awful lot about it.

But let’s be honest, what would Henry Winkler have if he wasn’t the Fonz or Jalel White if he wasn’t Urkel? Certainly not a fuller trophy shelf. Still typecasting seems to be a lingering enough fear for actor to attempt to “stretch” themselves. Which brings us to the phenomena of “Afflecting.”

Ben seemed like he might be a talent to watch(in my opinion) when he just played mooky everydudes to great effect both benevolent (Good Will Hunting, Glory Daze) and malevolent (Dazed and Confused, Mallrats). The cracks started to show around Armageddon, it might have been more evident if the contributions from both Liv and Steven Tyler weren’t so much worse.

Then, my God, where to start, where to finish? Forces of Nature, Reindeer Games, Pearl Harbor, Changing Lanes, Paycheck, Daredevil, Jersey Girl and Surviving Christmas all framing the standard from which all bad movies are measured, Gigli. He made this with his actual girlfriend and they still had the kind of chemistry that got me a D in science.

Pity poor Keanu Reeves, the guy has only truly been good at roles where he seems to be droolingly high. People argue with me with that assessment with The Matrix, a movie I think is great despite Keanu’s best efforts. Jesus, he was shown up by the dude from Bush in Constantine. It could also be contested that “Afflecting” could be better suited as “Keanuing”, at least Ben has never played a major religious figure like K-Reev did in Little Buddha, but this is my definition, you’re welcome to use “Keanuing” if you’d like in your own vocabulary. Maybe it’s because Ben seems smart enough to know better, but you can’t always smell your own stink.

They can both learn something from Vince Vaughn, whose come off a long period of being miscast (Psycho, anyone? Anyone?) to embrace his everydude roots to great effect in Old School, Dodgeball, and Wedding Crashers after forgetting them shortly after Swingers.

Take heart, for there is life after “Affecking”.