In Which We Determine Whether Wes Anderson Would Have Made This Tolerable
Monday, June 30, 2008 at 11:50AM 
The Thing Is...I'm Bruce Banner's Girlfriend Now
by Alex Carnevale
dir. Kevin Smith
102 minutes
There is no more of a blubbering classic than Kevin Smith's ill-timed, ill-directed and now forgotten 2004 movie Jersey Girl.
"this is AWK...yet the set design is fabulous!"
Even the most hardened anti-Smith critic had to admit Clerks had a certain Cassavettian charm. His follow-up to the sparingly budgeted film was the disastrous Mallrats. He found more of his voice with 1997's Chasing Amy in a role that actually fit the monotone Affleck, but mostly toiled under Rob Reiner-style "realism" in empty message movies like Dogma or the stoner comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
the black gloves remind one of a careful and considerate pedophile
Set in the unbelievable, separated by train tracks dichotomy between New York and Northern New Jersey, Affleck's big city relationship with Lopez turns sour when she dies having his child, played by some girl whose career was destroyed by this movie.
Seven years later, the resulting tyke is part demanding Latina diva and part shrugging Irish construction worker, kind of how you imagine Martha Stewart is off-camera.
i'm more into white girls than your mommy now
Liv Tyler is a brainy video store clerk who offers to bang the widower. This never quites get consummated, as a desire for a PG-13 rating interfered with any real sex. Their chaste relationship ends in nothingness, much like most of Smith's plots. He has less imagination than Nora Ephron or Katrina vanden Heuvel.
Smith is also terrible at casting, and he can't direct actors, except when they're children. So much of Jersey Girl is hopelessly manipulative. (You can imagine Harvey Weinstein looking at the first draft of the script and barking, "Someone dumb this down now!") These are not his major problems, but they stand out here.
In the original draft of the script, it was actually Bruce Willis rather than Will Smith who was the cause of (and eventual resolution to) Affleck's problems. Smith wrote the first fifty pages of the script with Bill Murray and Joey Lauren Adams in mind.
a jukebox...was there no director of continuity in this movie?
Chasing Amy highlighted what Smith is good at writing - romance. This subsequent disastrous foray into the genre while he was a relatively young filmmaker may have given him pause. I think he should have gone ethnic. If you can't beat Spike Lee, join him. Heck, he should have seen if they would have let him direct an episode of The Sopranos for practice.
you thought you were signing onto a hot project...WRONG GIRLFRIEND
My shit test for a script like this is, "Would Wes Anderson have made this tolerable?" And the answer is, probably not unless he did the Bill Murray version. We do know he would have subjected yet more minorities to condescension.
These stills from the movie show how exciting this canvas could have been if Smith was half the auteur he claimed to be in putting down superior peers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Harmony Korine.
"matt thinks he's like deniro putting on weight...what a fudgepacker"
He's actually not half bad at finding the ways people relate to each other, a behavior that is endlessly re-codified in this film's message about class. Like many suddenly rich people, Smith is obsessed with class. Manifesting sympathetic feelings towards the financial plight of the richest city in the world is hilarious, working-class fun for the humble Kevin.
As moralizing comedies go, we prefer the classic Spanglish, which will be revisited in film classes for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years.
"then your mom married Mark Antony...WTF right?!?"
Smith's forthcoming horror film, Red State, is another misstep in a career full of them. Smith should be directing cutesy romantic comedies with passionate monologues and Jewish protagonists. We recommend he pull a Robert Rodriguez-Rose McGowan with Jennifer Westfeldt. Fortunately there is the perfect melding of his talents in the Seth Rogen-Elizabeth Banks bonerfest Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Kevin, you were never a man of subtlety. Do you think he called up Judd Apatow every day asking for a script like a dog to a bone?
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.
WE WERE SO INNOCENT IN THOSE DAYS
"I'm A Pretender" - The Exploding Hearts (mp3)
"Boulevard Trash" - The Exploding Hearts (mp3)
"Dunford's Fancy" - The Waterboys (mp3)
"When Ye Go Away" - The Waterboys (mp3)
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