Watching Man About Town—a direct-to-DVD Ben Affleck vehicle about the profound existential angst of a hotshot Hollywood agent married to a supermodel—it's easy to imagine a studio executive listening to the pitch from writer-director Mike Binder and thinking "Wow. That sounds great. I know a dozen people just like the lead character." Audiences outside the narcissistic bubble of the film industry will find Affleck's character familiar for different, less-flattering reasons. He embodies two common cinematic types: the sycophantic, unscrupulous agent, and the slick overachiever humbled by a punishing gauntlet of rejection and humiliation. Alas, Hollywood's hunger for navel-gazing projects exposing its anxieties and obsessions far outstrips the public's appetite for such films, as evidenced by the paltry box-office returns of most Hollywood satires, and the burial of movies like Man About Town.
