Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got married, so I revisited their infamous 2003 flop.
The release of the infamous Bennifer train wreck Gigli blipped right by me, a rising college junior, in the doldrums of summer 2003. Since then, thanks to its reputation, it’s existed in my mind only as a shorthand for disaster. I wasn’t in a hurry to verify.
It was the Las Vegas nuptials of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez that finally drove me to it. A primer, in case you need it: Affleck and Lopez met on the set of Gigli in 2002 and became an item. They became engaged before the movie was released the following year, then broke up in January 2004 and moved on.
But last July, in an uneasy pandemic summer, the pair reunited. And though their coupling had provoked a lot of scorn in its early years, now it was an unabashed source of joy for everyone, including them. They finally tied the knot a year later, on July 16, 2022.
So this week, it was time to watch Gigli.
Here is the thing: The movie really isn’t quite as bad as its reputation makes it out to be. As others have noted, the infamy of Bennifer contributed mightily to its reception the first time around. (Metacritic rates it as “overwhelmingly disliked,” at 18/100.) Theaters dropped it like a hot potato; it opened in 2,215 theaters, but dropped by a record-setting 81.9 percent by the second weekend and 97 percent in the third. That means, by its third weekend, it was playing in 73 theaters — a wild bomb for a movie starring not just Affleck and Lopez, who had been on hot streaks, but Christopher Walken and Al Pacino. Al Pacino!
And while a lot of movies from the turn of the millennium feel like they’re from another planet, especially when it comes to misogyny and sexuality, Gigli is from another universe. It’s basically the story of a small-time mobster named Larry Gigli (rhymes with really, played by Affleck) who is hired to kidnap Brian (Justin Bartha), the intellectually disabled younger brother of a district attorney who won’t let a much bigger-time mobster (Pacino) alone. Then another contractor, who introduces herself as Ricki (Lopez), shows up to keep tabs on Larry and an eye on Brian. She and Larry, naturally, end up hooking up.
Except Ricki is into women, a fact she makes very clear to Larry from the beginning, making Gigli one of several movies in which a lesbian’s main hurdle to being with a man is that she hasn’t met Ben Affleck yet. (See also Chasing Amy.) And Brian’s characterization is — well, it’s a lot. Narratively, there’s really no reason that Brian had to be written as having intellectual disabilities, and not, for instance, as a smart-ass 11-year-old. The main point seems to be that it’s funny to laugh at the silly things he says. It’s … not great.
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Sony Pictures
But, but, but. While Gigli provides plenty to hate on — its tone is all over the place, its score is baffling, and, well, there’s everything mentioned above — I found myself getting oddly nostalgic, and not for ultra-low-rise jeans. Writer and director Martin Brest is no slouch; among his work is the highly decorated Scent of a Woman, shot a decade before Gigli. Affleck, who is a genuinely good director in his own right, has credited his success to his experience watching Brest direct actors on the Gigli set. In the film’s press notes, the cast praised Brest’s direction, with Lainie Kazan, who plays Larry’s mother, saying that “It’s very rare to be directed in such an open, positive way.”
And notes on the plot of the original cut of the movie, written up by film critic Michael Dequina following an early screening, show that Gigli was once a darker, weirder, and much more coherent movie. Its key difference from what made it to the screen is that Ricki is only pretending to be a killer. Pacino’s and Walken’s characters, reduced to scene-stealing but somewhat baffling cameos, were far more integrated into the story. The appearance of Ricki’s girlfriend — who in the theatrical version shows up and slits her wrists, then never reappears — suddenly gains meaning: She is the real assassin. Asides that Larry and Ricki make to one another start to make more sense. Even their hookup gains a sort of logic. And in the original version, Larry dies at the end.
What happened? It seems that the head of Revolution Studios, Joe Roth, was worried after mixed responses in test screenings that the movie wouldn’t do well, and he’d lose his hefty investment in the movie’s co-stars (Lopez made $12 million, Affleck $12.5 million). So though Brest had final cut on the movie, he was strong-armed into recutting it from a weird, offbeat movie about a gangster who wants out into a romantic comedy.
Gigli does not work at all as a rom-com. But knowing this made me wistful for a time when mid-budget rom-coms were the sort of thing you’d make if you needed to earn back your investment. Only in hindsight do we know that 2003 was near the end of the rom-com’s reign; soon they’d start regularly flopping, and now you’re lucky if you can find a watchable new rom-com on streaming services.
And yet, it’s fun to see how high the genre was flying at the time. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days made over $100 million at the box office, a marker of success by any measure, with Something’s Gotta Give hot on its heels at just over $80 million. Love Actually, Intolerable Cruelty, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the criminally underrated Down With Love are among the other rom-coms from that year. This was a time when stars were in mid-budget popcorn movies that now go straight to streaming, and we used to go watch comedies, made from original screenplays, at the theater. It was fun to laugh with other people, and you’d feel good when you went home. Now that sort of movie gets squeezed out entirely by massive-budget franchise films that require diagrams and homework assignments to keep straight.
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Sony Pictures
And then sometimes you’d just discover the movie you’d bought a ticket for was Gigli, and it sucked. Yet even Gigli has its charms. You can feel an independent intelligence — in this case, Brest’s — fighting to get out through the muck and confusion. Bad movies from that era tended, on the whole, to be bad in weird and interesting ways. Like, I don’t know what he was going for here, but you can tell he was going for something. You walk out scratching your head about how it went wrong, but at least it’s clear that this wasn’t really the movie they set out to make.
I thought about this because the week I watched Gigli, I also watched The Gray Man, the new Netflix joint starring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and Ana de Armas (who famously dated Affleck for a while, too, though that’s neither here nor there). And it’s bad, but in a deeply boring way. Movies like The Gray Man and the host of other very expensive, very dull films don’t evince some kind of ambition or drive to make a movie, so much as a big chunk of content to send down the tube. (And, in this case, one where the CGI looks truly dreadful.)
What was at least potentially fun about Gigli is the way it tried to play with the character of the gangster. Larry doesn’t have a heart of gold, but he does have ambitions to lead a normal life, and in the original version, he gets what he wanted. He’s learned to be a gangster from watching them on TV. Today’s generic bad movie, though, feels like it was created by an AI that’s been fed all the movies in the world and spat out another variation on one.
All of this should not be taken as an endorsement of Gigli. It’s not even particularly fun to watch, and in our world of unlimited entertainment, who has the time?
But I guess I’m glad I watched it, and I suppose I have Bennifer to thank for the reminder that movies don’t always have to be the way they often trend today. If Affleck is grateful for the experience — it’s where he met his wife, after all — then who am I to judge?
Gigli is available to rent or buy on digital platforms.
Remote work, the arrival of home-owning millennials, and other forces can be an opportunity to remake them for the better.
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Part of the July 2022 issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
The Covid era has produced a number of mixed narratives about housing, land use, and migration patterns. People are leaving the city, but also returning. Remote work is a historic shift in how Americans work, but 50 percent of workers actually can’t work from home. Construction is accelerating at the exurban edge of many metro areas — but many of the homes going up are dense multifamily structures and mixed-use developments, mimicking what you might find in an urban downtown.
Some interesting trends are taking shape in American suburbia. One thing we know, for example, is that the “flight,” or return, to the suburbs is real (though the death of the city is greatly overstated). We also know that more people are spending more time in the suburbs, and that many who moved there under remote work arrangements are likely to stay. In major American metro areas in East and West Coast cities, suburban prices grew rapidly during the pandemic compared with prices in the urban core, according to one Brookings Institution paper. “Further,” it states, “the gap between the two areas — urban and suburban — widened as the pandemic prolonged.” This trend was most pronounced in the Boston and Washington, DC, metro areas; the DC metro area is a premier example of many of these trends, and where they may be going today.
“It’s a very strong phenomenon right now, staying within the metro area but moving to a suburban neighborhood rather than central, dense neighborhoods,” says economist Stephan Whitaker. It could look like another round of flight from the city. Or what we may be witnessing is a “second draft” of the American suburbs.
The suburbs first began to appear in the period after the Civil War, and they grew rapidly with the spread of the electric streetcar in the early 1900s. Many of these very early suburbs retained urban features. When we say “the suburbs” today, however, we often imagine an alternative to, or even a negation of, the city.
The suburbs exploded when post-World War II America needed lots of housing cheap and fast — modern suburbia was essentially a housing program. Suburbs received another influx in the era of “white flight” and racial tensions in American cities in the 1960s and 1970s. That era also saw a wave of downzonings across the country, ensuring that most new development would be single-family or, at most, low-rise multifamily.
The suburbs are still growing, both getting denser and sprawling outward. Some of this follows the rise of remote work, but much of it is also driven not by would-be residents’ desire to leave the city but by sky-high urban housing prices.
The demand for something like urban living is real. Even at the outer edges of growing metro areas, mixed-use walkable developments pop up alongside familiar subdivisions and McMansions. “Mixed-use centers—often in suburban locations—continue to be built from the ground up in many communities across the US,” wrote the Congress for the New Urbanism in 2019.
As more immigrants and millennials become suburbanites, and as Covid and remote work give the suburbs another growth spurt, they are evolving into something different. Between 2019 and 2020, the share of millennials who live in suburbs increased by 4 percentage points; and in 2014, more than 60 percent of immigrants lived in suburbs, up from just over half in 2000.
Many communities that were once white, exclusionary, and car-dependent are today diverse and evolving places, still distinct from the big city but just as distinct from their own “first draft” more than a half-century ago.
Consider the Levitt houses of Long Island — a sort of ur-suburbia — very few of which still look like they did when they were built. Most have been modified, renovated, and expanded over the years; what was once a standard product has diverged in thousands of ways. (Some are even under-the-table duplexes, and it seems to work just fine.)
Levittown was the first draft, not the final or perpetual state. The distributed, incremental evolution we can observe with these decades-old tract houses is coming to fruition in the suburbs, writ large.
The ongoing diversification of the suburbs is coinciding with the appearance of New Urbanist, mixed-use development there, and the renewed interest in suburban living following the pandemic. The makings of a suburban transformation are here.
It’s likely that the average person isn’t necessarily thinking in terms of urban design, or density, or mixed-use development. They simply have, as Maryland-based urban planner Dan Reed told me, “the desire to be near things.” Even before the pandemic, Business Insider listed the 25 fastest-appreciating suburbs in the United States — a list that included places as different as exurban, car-dependent DeSoto, Texas, and New Jersey’s more urban Union City. It includes several suburbs in Florida and Washington, but also a couple in seemingly less likely Michigan.
This desire to be near things is as likely to lure millennials leaving the city to seek less expensive housing as it is immigrants coming from countries with more traditional urbanism, and remote workers looking for amenities they used to find near their urban offices. What makes suburbs desirable for many people today is not what Americans traditionally associate with “the suburbs.” It’s vibrant dining scenes — according to the New York Times, some of the best in the country — nightclubs, taller buildings, and walkable developments.
Even before the pandemic, these trends were intersecting. The DC metro area, where I live, is one of the finest examples. But it is not the only one.
Edison, New Jersey, for example, boasts a large Indian American population, and its unassuming Oak Tree Road corridor is one of America’s largest concentrations of Indian restaurants and businesses. In suburban Atlanta, Georgia, the Buford Highway commercial strip is a lively international neighborhood inhabiting what might otherwise have aged into a worn-out postwar suburban development.
In my own region, there’s a 1950s strip plaza noted for its concentration of Bangladeshi and other South Asian shops and restaurants, and an even larger shopping center boasting one of the country’s largest concentrations of Vietnamese restaurants and businesses.
All of these places serve as community fixtures for whichever immigrant communities live and shop there, and that’s how they first arose. Over time, they’ve also become local attractions, part of the appeal for other suburbanites, too. Lifestyle magazines, geared toward an upper-middle-class readership, frequently feature these diverse suburban community centers in restaurant reviews and “things to see” lists. New Jersey Monthly, for example, heralds Oak Tree Road as a dream for Indian food lovers; Food & Wine Magazine dubs Atlanta’s Buford Highway corridor “one of the South’s most fascinating places.” Ditto for Northern Virginia’s Eden Center.
Unlike urban immigrant neighborhoods of the 19th and 20th centuries, many of these communities inhabit what are now older suburban landscapes. Annandale, a Fairfax County, Virginia, community of largely postwar vintage, is the DC area’s Koreatown. In Maryland’s DC suburbs, many aging strip plazas are filled with African and Latino small businesses. Many of us have seen an urban food hall inhabiting an old factory, with exposed brick and Edison bulbs; Annandale has a food hall, too, founded and owned by Asian Americans, but it inhabits an old strip mall that was all but abandoned after the closure of a Kmart.
That’s the essence of the subtle but real suburban transformation. These days, they serve immigrants but also attract tourists and other visitors, and serve as places of cultural interest for residents in general.
Reed says he thinks people are looking for something that “feels enough like a place.” That can be something like an upscale mixed-use town center; it can be informal arrangements like food trucks, barbecue smokers, and coffee shops setting up in disused suburban parking lots. Some are disused because they were park-and-rides; others sit in neighborhoods that now tilt working-class, where fewer households own two cars. What these places aren’t, any longer, is that flight-from-the-city first draft.
If a “second draft” of the suburbs is now being written — at least in some of America’s growing and expensive metro areas — what might it actually look like? On that note, back to the DC suburbs.
Rockville, Maryland, a suburban community about half an hour from DC by car, didn’t always look like standard suburban sprawl. In the early 20th century, it had trolley service into the urban core. The trolleys completed “24 trips a day between 6:30 a.m. and 12:30 a.m.,” not unlike the region’s subway service today. The trolleys were scrapped in 1935, and it was not until 1984 that the Metro system was extended out to Rockville.
Looking back, scrapping the trolleys wasn’t Rockville’s only mistake. In 1962, the town embraced urban renewal and leveled nearly all of its original downtown, wiping not only the buildings but even the street grid off the map. In its place, they built a mall and office complex. That period, from 1935 to 1984, and especially from 1962 to 1984 — no rail, no downtown — typifies what we often mean by “suburban.”
Today, Rockville is very different, and in some ways it resembles its original state more than its “suburban interlude.” Rockville is widely considered to be the region’s main Chinatown, with a population that is about 20 percent Asian American, and an array of restaurants, Chinese newspapers, and other businesses that serve a predominantly Chinese customer base. In the 2000s, the mall that stood atop the old “downtown” was demolished, and a “town center” with gridded streets was built in its place. For curmudgeons or NIMBYs who think these trends are altering Rockville’s character, they just need to look further back for their baseline. The changes in Rockville aren’t turning it into something it isn’t; they’re turning it into something it used to be, and continuing a process artificially arrested by the suburban era.
It’s a matter of some debate whether suburbs were “supposed” to become encased in amber, built at once “to a finished state” and barely changing after that, their land use destined to end up at the mercy of NIMBYism. Zoning codes were not really meant to be perpetual; master plans were supposed to guide their evolution over the decades, planning for and accommodating growth. But in most places, that did not happen: Most growth was sprawling and horizontal, and many suburban landscapes still appear essentially unchanged from when they were built in the midcentury.
But allowing these places to change, and embracing the change already occurring, doesn’t mean wiping them off the map — hopefully, we learned that from our urban renewal mistakes. Their next chapter is waiting to be written; maybe this time, we’ll understand that the writing is never done.
Addison Del Mastro writes on urbanism and cultural history. He’s also the author The Deleted Scenes on Substack.
At the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, Black riders and fans bring a sense of swaggering cool to a culture overlooked by the history books.
Part of the July 2022 issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
The tale of Bill Pickett, a legendary Black cowboy often barred from competing in largely white rodeos, stuck with Lu Vason. A Denver entrepreneur, Vason had first heard of Pickett — who invented the skill known as “bulldogging” to subdue wayward steers — on a chance visit to Denver’s Black American West Museum.
Historians estimate that one-quarter of American cowboys were Black, but Vason felt that Pickett and other turn-of-the-century Black figures who were part of the fabric of America’s Western expansion had been all but written out of history books. So, in 1984, Vason started the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, a Black rodeo that he saw as a way to challenge and broaden the narrow lore of the West. Today, the rodeo crisscrosses the US, serving as an inclusive gathering place for Black rodeo fans and budding Black rodeo stars alike.
San Francisco-based photographer Gabriela Hasbun was invited to tag along with friends to a Bill Pickett rodeo stop in 2007 at Rowell Ranch Rodeo, east of Oakland, California. Captivated, she returned a year later with a medium-format camera and a bag of film. For a decade, Hasbun captured what she saw: an age-old tradition infused with pride, highly modern fashion, and personal expression. A Bill Pickett rodeo is a place you might meet a horse named after Dapper Dan, catch a glimpse of a saddle emblazoned with the Louis Vuitton logo and artisan metalwork, or marvel at all the hair (horse), the nails (human), and the swagger (everyone).
Like Vason, Hasbun didn’t think the community was getting its due. “I couldn’t believe there was this huge Black community — very family-driven — having a wholesome event, and the media was overlooking it,” she told Vox.
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“These kids are cool. They look cool,” says Hasbun. “They reek of cool. It’s this crazy attraction they have with the whole sport.”
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From top left, an attendee of the rodeo shows off his style in this undated photo; longtime rider and rancher known as Mr. Theus, for whom decking out himself and his horse — he has saddles, he says, by the saddle maker for Roy Rogers and Gene Autry — has earned him many fans at the rodeo. Bottom, from left: Harold Williams Jr. (in chaps) and Lindon Demery, two junior rodeo champions, captured in 2018; and Adrian Vance and Ronnie Franks, left, in red, who are mother-daughter cowgirls from Atlanta. The two sit with other contestants to watch the races in this 2008 photo. Many cowgirls compete in the rodeo’s barrel-racing competition.
Hasbun’s new book, The New Black West, captures the horsey set as a colorful whirl of activity and flash amid the faded, sun-washed backdrop of the dusty beiges of the drought-ridden country and the denim blue of the clear sky.
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Images like her striking shot of Juanita Brown and her granddaughter Iyauna Austin atop their horses, with their African print skirts draped across their horses, and their dusty, worn lace-up boots peeking out from the stirrups, Hasbun believes, will help rewrite the story of the West, and of cowboy culture.
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“No one,” Hasbun says, “can ignore a Black woman on a horse.”
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The New Black West was published by Chronicle Books in 2022. Gabriela Hasbun is a photographer specializing in portraits; her work highlights marginalized and under-explored communities.
Lavanya Ramanathan is the editor of the Highlight.