Jersey Girl
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Movie Reviews of Jersey Girl
Movie Review: Super movie
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is sweet and funny. A little sad at times, but a happy ending.Movie Review: Love this movie!
Summary: 5 Stars
Love Kevin Smith & love this movie! It made me cry! Such a great movie!Movie Review: Very Funny
Summary: 5 Stars
I think Jersey girl is one of the funniest movies i have ever seen.Movie Review: The Moose Hole - Smith Returns to 'Jersey' Roots
Summary: 4 Stars
Can the man who has created some of the most crude, vulgar, and offensive films in recent memory prove he has heart and yet retain a connection with the cult following his raunchy features have created? That is the question cult-director Kevin Smith is facing with the release of his new film, Jersey Girl. Smith has come a long way from his humble beginning working in a convenience store in his home state of New Jersey, the same place where he filmed his first movie, Clerks. After collecting nearly $27,000, Smith shot the film in the convenience store and premiered it at the Sundance Film Festival becoming one of the biggest highlights of the event. Once he struck up a distribution deal with Miramax, the then still relatively unknown independent studio, Smith completed work on Mallrats, which ended up being a complete dud. After publicly apologizing for the film, Smith bounced back in a big way with Chasing Amy, wowing both the critics and the public alike with his perceptive dialogue. With the controversial Dogma and critically lauded Jay & Silent Bob behind him, Kevin Smith hopes to return to the genre that made him prominent in the main stream world of filmmaking.
The story focuses on a man who once had everything in the world he could ask for but saw everything come falling down to Earth after the birth of his daughter. Ollie Trinke is one of the biggest music publicists in New York City and everything seems to be working perfectly for him. He has a well paid job, a beautiful wife, and a brand new child on the way. It seems as though nothing could wrong ? until one day it does. Struggling with the concept of being a single father after the death of his wife and a hectic career on top of that, Ollie snaps at a large press event and ends up losing his dream job. With nothing left for him besides his infant daughter, he moves back to New Jersey with his father and for the next seven years takes up grunge work in which he finds no contentment in. In those seven years Ollie?s only priority is his daughter and remains in a continual rut until one night while renting movies from the video store he meets Maya. After bantering him about renting a porno and being caught by little Gertie in the act, Maya strikes up a close friendship with the reflective father, who still dreams of the life he once had. When he has the opportunity to return to the life he has missed for seven years, Ollie must decide whether to be return to the life he believes is still waiting for him or be happy with the life he has now. The story for Jersey Girl, like that of Chasing Amy, is full of rich, discerning dialogue that audiences have come to love from Kevin Smith, with the vulgarity toned down a tad (note the word ?tad?). Though the plot treads on the line of predictability, the conservative message it expresses and the importance it lays on the issue of family makes the whole thing worth while.
There are several things to expect from a Kevin Smith film, one of which includes a well-stocked cast that includes several familiar faces from his previous films. That remains true for this film although they are mainly pushed to the background, with the exception of lead man Ben Affleck. Before focusing on anything else, let?s get the most prominent subject out of the way ? Unless you had serious problems with the chemistry between Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck in Gigli (we?re talking recursive nightmares here), any complaints should remain at a minimum as the two are only together for about eight minutes on screen and don?t present mis-matchment in that time frame. Despite certain moments of relative dryness, Affleck?s performance on screen doesn?t a problem at all on screen and shouldn?t for anyone outside of those who hate the man going into the film. Raquel Castro accentuates on screen with a wonderfully balanced chemistry with Ben Affleck and properly illustrated connection with several supporting members of the cast. The main emphasis on this talented young actress has to be the look she presents on screen, which is a somewhat eerily reflection of a childlike version of Jennifer Lopez. This effect stresses the message that Smith tries to get across within the plot of the film. Though the sequence barely makes a dent within the nearly two hour feature, the selective and well construed conversation between Will Smith and Affleck?s Ollie Trinke brings every point Smith attempts to get across in this film all into one cumulative moment. The whole piece feels so honest and realistic that audience members can truly understand the meaning that is presented in this conversational moment.
Overall, despite lacking the bite and edginess that Kevin Smith?s features are known for, Jersey Girl showcases not only his talented writing ability but his belief in the value of the family and its importance in life as well. No doubt several ?Jay & Silent Bob? fanatics will come out of this ranting on how Smith has sold-out but if that?s true then perhaps Smith is the only true one within the ViewAskew universe that has matured. Granted the film is far from perfect with the cinematography being off at times, the plot trailing off every so often into the obscure realm of predictability and the musical score not working with the actions on screen, this despite the fact that several songs used worked much better. So what should make you go see this film out in theatres? Its message. In the modern world where society has been taught that the most important element in life is success and anything else prior to that must take a backseat, Smith recalls the values we once had prior to the Hilary-esque village concept. Family, most importantly the children, must be the most essential part of a person?s life and nothing; absolutely nothing should come before that. Smith also emphasizes the idea most prominent in The Great Gatsby in that although many of us would love to return to the life we had in the past, realistically we know that?s not going to happen and giving up on an unobtainable dream to focus on the present reality isn?t always the life of quiet desperation. Not necessarily Kevin Smith?s most fanatically successful film but showcases maturity in the realm of filmmaking.
Movie Review: BEYOND THE COMIC BOOKS
Summary: 4 Stars
Kevin Smith has produced a movie that dispenses with his normal scatological humor and his fans do not like it one bit. That says more about them than it does about Jersey Girl, a touching if formulaic movie starring the much underappreciated Ben Affleck as a widowed single father who is raising his daughter while trying to get back to the life and career he once had. This is a good movie and it demonstrates that Smith has a range that extends beyond the four-letter word toilet comedy that appeals to his normally below normal adolescent audience.
Jersey Girl begins when Ollie Trinkie (Affleck), a high-powered Manhattan publicist, finds himself a widower when his wife, played competently by Affleck?s ex-fiancee Jennifer Lopez, dies in childbirth. When Ollie offends his client ? the actor Will Smith - under the strain of trying to balance his career with his responsibilities as a parent, he finds himself out of a job and moved in with his father, Bart (George Carlin).
Flash forward seven years and Ollie is working with his father for the public works department of the New Jersey suburb where they live while raising his beloved daughter, Gertie, played by a wildly talented child actress named Raquel Castro. Ollie?s life is now one of street sweepers, sewer lines, school plays, multiple failed attempts to get back into the New York publicists business and weekly trips to the video store with his little daughter where he meets Maya (Liv Tyler), a grad student working her way through school while she completes her thesis on married men and pornography. They fall in love, though that is not the focus of the story.
The rest of the plot follows a predictable course. Ollie finally gets an interview that will allow him to move back to New York and his old career, dismaying his father, Maya and Gertie. Worse still, the interview is the same afternoon as Gertie?s school play in which Ollie is supposed to participate.
The flaw in Jersey Girl is obvious. The plot has been done a thousand times before and the outcome is not in doubt. This outrages Kevin Smith's fans, who are not happy when movies are not about frustrated lesbian love affairs and the joys of prolonged adolescence. However, there is a reason for formulas. They work when done right, and Jersey Girl is done very right.
The point is not the plot, per se, rather the point is the characters and whether they are engaging enough as people for the audience to be able to relate to them. Here is where Jersey Girl works its magic. Jersey Girl?s characters are refreshingly normal. The audience relates to them because their motivations are very human, their flaws are understandable and not so extreme as to be inexcusable, and their underlying nobility turns them from ordinary into extraordinary people. In short, they are a delight to watch and it is easy to care about them. From Ollie's life of quiet desperation and its competing deep love for his daughter to his father's grumpy old man sentimentality to Maya's wide-eyed good heartedness to Gertie's genuine childlike love for her father and her family, the characters elicit sympathy, empathy and admiration.
Moreover, the formula works because the situations are real. It is hard not to laugh when Ollie is faced with the daunting task of trying to answer Gertie's questions about ?boy parts.? How many parents have similarly squirmed? Equally, the pain is palpable when Ollie, desperate to go to the interview that will get him his old job, angrily tells his daughter that he hates her because she took his life away. He instantly regrets what he says and begs for forgiveness from his little girl as the tears stream down her face. The scene hurts because the audience knows how often hasty words are said in anger.
Also, the acting in Jersey Girl is terrific. As Maya, Liv Tyler has a role where her looks and charm perfectly mesh with her character. Maya shocks with her forwardness but attracts with her warmth and tenderness. George Carlin as Bart splendidly mixes blue-collar harshness with the wisdom of years. He does not preach, but he lives by an uncomplicated moral code and he expects it to be followed. Raquel Castro as Gertie is magnificent. This young girl displays a mastery of dialogue and expression so natural that it seems effortless. Jason Biggs, Stephen Root and Mike Starr also do well in their supporting roles, as does, it must be said in all fairness, Jennifer Lopez
Special credit, however, deserves to be given to the much-abused Ben Affleck. If Jersey Girl is being punished by fans and critics because Kevin Smith dared to write a movie for people too old to read comics, Affleck is being doubly punished because he dared to date Jennifer Lopez. There is no other reasonable explanation for criticizing his work in Jersey Girl.
Previously, Bounce was Affleck's best leading man romance movie. However, in Jersey Girl, Affleck makes a quantum leap. He brings to the role of Ollie a genuineness and sincerity that the cynically inclined are too quick to dismiss. Most of all, Affleck makes an unbelievably convincing father. He manages a tone of voice and demeanor that conveys by turns parental pride, exasperation, uncertainty, humor, grief, subdued desperation and the deep sense of love to which any parent could relate. No Hollywood-style father-daughter banter here, thank goodness. Affleck does serious work in Jersey Girl, and if he lacks the range of some actors, he still shows a real ability to express the depths of human feeling.
Jersey Girl's main sin is that it lacks the biting irony that has been the hallmark of Smith's other films. Instead, what Jersey Girl offers is a tribute to those bonds of love and friendship that are the glue of family and the foundation of character. Is it formula? Sure, and the world could use a bit more of it.