"Jersey Girl": Two Write-Offs For The Price Of One
Written: Sep 15 '04 (Updated Jan 12 '06)
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The Bottom Line: Alcohol cannot disguise a bad film
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| Simply_Crispy's Full Review: Jersey Girl |
So here it is then, the third review for my own "Drunken Review” write-off. Same old, same old I suppose. More inebriated mutterings, typo’s by the dozen and some extremely dubious critique. Yup, you get all that and much much more, because this write-off entry is also doubled up, like a guy who has just kicked himself square in the nuts, with the second coming of Lynus’ superb “Let’s See You Review This” W/O, in which members choose a film for each other to review. I would like to thank Mfunk75 for choosing my particular title. But seeing as he picked such a godawful film, I don’t think I will. The tosser
‘Be careful what you wish for’ goes the infamous saying. How very true. Why, only the other week I pondered about how great it would be to step in a huge pile of dogshit, and ruin my expensive new shoes. You’ll never guess what happened next? Yup, that’s right, I stood in cat shit instead. You can imagine my disappointment. Or how about the time I logged onto Yahoo search and thought “wouldn’t it be great if there was a review site out there that any random nobody could submit reviews on?” The result? A three year, and counting, stint on Epinions (well, the first year was okay I suppose, but then all the good writers left).
This proverb can also be accredited to certain passing thoughts about the work of Kevin Smith. After five films that centered around New Jersey, a couple of obnoxious-yet-loveable stoners and numerous references to ‘cock-knockers’, ‘clam-lappers’ and Ben Affleck jibes, it was becoming obvious that he was beginning to run out of material. “He seriously, honestly, compulsively, must stretch his wings into different areas of filmmaking. His once-honest voice may well have been a true breath of fresh air, but it’s now beginning to have a distinct whiff of a man afraid to venture into new territory” I recall one of the modern era’s greatest writers commenting over two years ago (though there's little evidence to support this in that particular review, which is crap)
So where do we go from here? Where does a man, famed for his comic book moonlighting and Star Wars obsession go with his career once he has wrung every last drop out of his self-indulgent Jay And Silent Bob movies? How about the road marked ‘sellout’? Why not drop all the satire and instead churn out a by-the-book romantic comedy, and pass it off as a ‘grown-up’ project? And why bother trying to find an A-list star to headline the whole thing when you can just use your best mate yet again, even if he is completely miscast? In other words, why not make Jersey Girl?
It’s no great secret that Jersey Girl tanked at the box office. Numerous reasons for this were churned out: it was saddled as Gigli 2, thanks to the presence of the now defunct Bennifer combination. His fans weren’t willing to accept his shift into the mainstream. It was released during an unusually competitive month at the Box Office.
None of these are the real reason why it crashed and burned. The truth is, you’ve probably seen Jersey Girl before, back in 1995. Except back then it was called Jack And Sarah and starred Richard E Grant, who loses his wife during childbirth and has to come to terms with single parenthood with the help of the youthful Samantha Mathis, and is forced to learn serious lessons about life and stuff. And that’s not to say that Jersey Girl is a moderate rip-off, or even a poor remake. It just means that it’s a depressingly uninspired mess that - true to the rom-com genre - doesn’t even attempt to be remotely original.
The movie begins in 1996, with Affleck as Ollie Trinke, a hotshot Manhattan celebrity publicist with the world at his feet. He is rich, talented, well liked among his peers, and has a beautiful girlfriend named Gertrude (Jennifer Lopez). Although they are very much in love, his hectic lifestyle and workaholic attitude limits the amount of time he has to spend with her. Even after he proposes to her their time together is at a premium, though reading between the lines I suspect this might have been a conscious decision. I mean, how easy can it be to get all love-dovey with someone called frickin’ Gertrude? Seriously, what the hell?
Anyway, shortly after their wedding, she discovers that she is pregnant and makes him promise that he will spend more time with her and the baby. Ultimately, however, he is only ever going to be able to fulfill half of that promise, because Gertrude pops her clogs when she drops her sprog.
Of course, this isn’t any real great secret – so keen were the producers to disassociate this film from Gigli that they practically insisted all reviews and features on the film contained this information – but it’s actually a bit of a shame, because ironically Lopez, who has underperformed in so many films throughout her career, is immensely watchable in the limited time she is given here. Her doting wifey role is tender and luminous, which goes a long way to not only explain why Ollie spends all of his waking hours moping around over her death, but also remains so true to her memory that he takes a vow of celibacy.
Of course, all that self-pity isn’t going to help anyone, especially when it turns out that not only is Ollie a lousy father, but his career is going up in shit. Despite the help of his father, Bart (George Carlin) – is Smith taking the piss with these names now? Ollie, Gertrude, Bart? – the pressure to hold a job while raising a daughter, whom he has called Gertie (!), begins to take its toll until one day he totally loses it, snapping during the opening of a Hard Rock Café, and berates the prospects of the then second rate musician and TV actor Will Smith ("Yeah, like the Fresh Prince is ever gonna have a movie career").
Needless to say he is fired on the spot, and is forced to move back to - where else? -, New Jersey. Cut to seven years later and Ollie is now working with his dad in the public works department and his mewling brat has transformed into a gobby little upstart (now played by Raquel Castro), something that movies believe to be ‘cute’. A few times a week, Ollie and Gertie go to the local video store, where she plunders the kiddie section while he makes a quick grab for a porno. One night he's confronted by Maya (Liv Tyler), who is researching a thesis on the porn-viewing habits of middle-aged men, naturally, for the sole reason of giving Smith an excuse to write about masturbation in a newly 'adult' way. Adult or not, it’s just further proof that he's not quite ready to put the adolescent dick jokes of Chasing Amy behind him just yet.
And then, of course, they start dating – the attraction between the two based on the notion Maya may be bold about sex, but she is serious about love. That, and the fact that she offers to be the first woman to sleep with him since his wife.
The problem here is not in these occasional moments of misplaced vulgarity, but in that Smith has seen fit to do away with his reliable dialogue skills, and instead does his damndest to have us blubbing into our popcorn, with a style so manipulative it’d put Richard Curtis to shame. The film is overstuffed with every feel-good/feel-bad cliches on the market. 'I'm your dad now,' Ollie tells baby Gertie, 'it's what I do best' as he wipes a tear from his eye, before we cut to one of many of the films montages, designed to express deep emotional truths that can only be expressed by an overpowering soundtrack.
In fact, Affleck is given very little to do here, because whenever the script calls for him to actually act, Smith drowns the scene in another soppy/uplifting/life affirming blast from a song that literally describes the emotions that both the characters and we the audience are supposed to be feeling. You can almost imagine him telling his stars “just sit there and look sad. I'll get a song to add the atmosphere later on”.
The most unforgivable example of this directorial inadequacy comes about when Ollie attends a rowdy meeting of local residents protesting the temporary blocking of a street for repairs and he takes it upon himself to calm them down, his PR skills put to the test against the real people rather than the fawning saps he used to deal with. Could have been a great scene, had Smith had any faith in his dialogue-writing skills. We know he can do it, because we saw it enough throughout Chasing Amy, but here he wrecks the whole thing by having Ben talking under an uplifting pile of dirge booming from the soundtrack, while numerous extras nod in agreement. Stop telling us how we should be feeling godammit and start showing us why we should be feeling like this.
The result is that he struggles to make any of his characters interesting, amusing or sympathetic. Try as she might, Tyler spends most of her time looking confused as the naive and sincere Maya. Her unique attribute seems to be that she is an angel of mercy, who wants to sleep with Ollie not to get her kicks but as an act of generosity. Now, it may just be me, but any girl who chooses to sleep with someone because she thinks that he deserves a sympathy shag is hard to view as strong and independent. It takes an enormous lack of self-respect to even entertain the idea, and a special kind of idiocy for an audience to believe that a woman would spread her legs out of the goodness of her heart, but Tyler manages to nail it, so to speak, hook line and sinker.
As for Castro, well… she’s just another nail in the coffin marked “Reasons Why Kids Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Star In Movies”. Just as you can bet your ass that most rom-coms will contain little to no invention, you can also remain confident that any kid who appears in them will pull the same old ‘cute and bubbly innocence that teaches the grown-ups about true love’ shtick. Even more disturbing, though, is a supposedly hilarious scene where Gertie and one of her male friends expose themselves to one another. That’s right, folks, kiddie porn is now officially acceptable in Hollywood films.
It all peters out into a howlingly predictable ending, where Ollie is forced to choose between landing a dream job, or attending his kid's school play. It’s the cliché of clichés, utilising the three most run-of-the-mill scenario’s in film history and transforming them into one big pile of clag: The choice between the big city and staying with your family in a small town; the parent who arrives at a school play just at the moment when the child onstage is in despair because that parent seems to be missing; and the infamous 'slow clap'. Utter, utter bollocks.
Kevin, forget what we said. Go back to ‘cock-knockers’. Give us more of your vulgarity. Dig up Jay and Silent Bob once again. That way you might not have a prolific career, but at least you’ll have a career, which is more than can be said if you continue down this path. ‘Self-gratifying indulgent’ is, after all, more respectable than ‘failed sell-out’
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Simply_Crispy
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 - Top 1000 |
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Location: Peterborough, UK
Reviews written: 210
Trusted by: 158 members
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Aiming for the top 500.
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