Ben Affleck’s DVD commentary on Armageddon is LOL
For the past 33 years, The Criterion Collection has been “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements” and includes films like The 400 Blows, Hoop Dreams, and Seven Samurai. One of the more unusual movies in the collection is Michael Bay’s Armageddon. You definitely won’t find many other films with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 39% in there.
On the commentary track included on the Armageddon DVD, Ben Affleck goes off for a couple of minutes about the scene where Bruce Willis’ character argues for sending oil drillers into space rather than training astronauts to drill. It’s hilarious.
I asked Michael why it’s easier to train oil drillers to be astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers. He told me to “shut shut shut the fuck up.” So that was the end of that talk. … See here’s where we demonstrate that because Bruce is gonna tell the guys that they did a bad job of building the drill tank. See, he’s a salt of the earth guy and the NASA nerdonauts don’t understand his salt of the earth ways, his rough and tumble ways. Like somehow they can build rocket ships but they don’t understand, like what makes a good tranny.
But he didn’t actually hate the movie. Or perhaps he did.
But Ben Affleck is far from finished with this movie. He recounts an argument wherein an incredulous Michael Bay asked him why he’d never learned how to pretend like he was floating in acting school. Affleck told him most acting training does not, in fact, include “weightless mime.”
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