So I walked into the multiplex on a Sunday afternoon and sat down and began to notice, geez, there're a lot of young girls in here. Tweens. Odd, I thought, for a Kevin Smith movie. Maybe they're here for J-Lo, I reasoned. And then the previews, and the first preview was for some fantasy movie with horses and castles, and obviously aimed at the pre-teen girl demographic. Puzzled, I picked up my popcorn and Pepsi and headed out to the hall to check the marquee and make sure I hadn't wandered into Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen by mistake. I hadn't. This was Jersey Girl.
I hadn't read anything about Jersey Girl before going in, and I just assumed it was a typical Kevin Smith movie. It totally is not. Oh, sure, there're a few dick jokes and some poop and Ben Affleck, but Jersey Girl is far, far away from the Kevin Smith I've come to know and sort of moderately like.
For me, the experience of watching this film felt a lot like a time in college when I was at a Halloween party, and my one tubby, bearded, video-game-playing, football-watching stoner friend showed up dressed as Princess Jasmine from the Disney movie Aladdin (1992). And it turned out he was serious. I was sort of touched and horrified at the same time.
This movie confused me as well. At first, I thought maybe Kevin Smith was making fun of all those awful, cynically-calculated tween-targeted movies like Uptown Girls, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. And I thought maybe he was packing the movie full of clichés and mawkish sentimentality as a weird sort of joke. But then as the movie wore on, I grew increasingly uncomfortable as I began to realize that he probably meant it, or at least was trying to mean it.
I'm generally all in favor of a filmmaker branching out and trying new and different things, but I'm very much un-in favor of an independent and formerly semi-interesting filmmaker branching out into the worst sort of hackneyed Hollywood filmmaking, without any of the wit, observation, and conversation that formerly made Kevin Smith semi-interesting.
This film felt like a film made by a filmmaker who felt he had to make a film because he's a filmmaker, and filmmakers make films, though he had nothing he felt strongly about making a film about, and so he just made a film about this crap. Is Kevin Smith washed up?
4/10
I hadn't read anything about Jersey Girl before going in, and I just assumed it was a typical Kevin Smith movie. It totally is not. Oh, sure, there're a few dick jokes and some poop and Ben Affleck, but Jersey Girl is far, far away from the Kevin Smith I've come to know and sort of moderately like.
For me, the experience of watching this film felt a lot like a time in college when I was at a Halloween party, and my one tubby, bearded, video-game-playing, football-watching stoner friend showed up dressed as Princess Jasmine from the Disney movie Aladdin (1992). And it turned out he was serious. I was sort of touched and horrified at the same time.
This movie confused me as well. At first, I thought maybe Kevin Smith was making fun of all those awful, cynically-calculated tween-targeted movies like Uptown Girls, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. And I thought maybe he was packing the movie full of clichés and mawkish sentimentality as a weird sort of joke. But then as the movie wore on, I grew increasingly uncomfortable as I began to realize that he probably meant it, or at least was trying to mean it.
I'm generally all in favor of a filmmaker branching out and trying new and different things, but I'm very much un-in favor of an independent and formerly semi-interesting filmmaker branching out into the worst sort of hackneyed Hollywood filmmaking, without any of the wit, observation, and conversation that formerly made Kevin Smith semi-interesting.
This film felt like a film made by a filmmaker who felt he had to make a film because he's a filmmaker, and filmmakers make films, though he had nothing he felt strongly about making a film about, and so he just made a film about this crap. Is Kevin Smith washed up?
4/10