The new film from Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma), the trailer is now available on-line. You can go view it at NewsAskew.com

*WARNING! SPOILERS!*


It stars Ben Affleck as Ollie (gee, wonder where Kev, who wrote Green Arrow for 15 issues got THAT name ;). ) Trinkie, a super-succesful music business agent, and Jason Biggs as his protege. His life takes an unexpected turn when he meets Gerdie (played by real-life fiance Jennifer Lopez) and she becomes pregnant.

*SPOILER*
Sadly for Ollie, Gerdie dies in child birth, and Ollie moves back in with his father, played by comedian George Carlin, to raise their child alone.

Cut to a few years later, and the child is now 5, played by newcomer Raquel Castro, and Ollie nervously begins to open up to people again by developing a friendship with a video store clerk (I'm not kidding) played by Affleck's Armageddon co-star Liv Tyler.

The early screening reviews for this film are exceptional, and most people who've seen it agree that ANY comparison to that other Bennifer flick, the piece of •••• called Gigli, are unfair and anyone who decided not to see this moive based on Gigli alone is an idiot. The trailer is really sweet, and I think this will help Smith break his "$30 Million glass ceiling," referrign to the fact that no movie he made has ever grossed more than $30 Mil (the most succesful of the two that made that much, Dogma, cost only $10 mil to make so it did better than $20 mil budget Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back).

Two of Ben Affleck's firends, Matt Damon and Jason Lee reportedly have cameos, though Lee's is the only confirmed one. The film also stars Law & Order's S. Epatha Merkerson as Ollie and Gerdie's doctor. No surprise since anyone whose seen the commentary track for Dogma knows that Kev is a Law & Order junkie, not unlike myself.

Um, I just realized that it should read Jersey Girl (2004). JD, could ya maybe change that so I don't like like a compelte git?

I was surprised at what Jennifer Lopez's role in this film appears to be from the trailer. I haven't heard Liv Tyler emphasized as the female lead.

The girl who plays the daughter, on the other hand, is adorable.

Luigi: Actually the poster seems to be pushing the daughter (Racquel Castro) as the female lead, as the movie is more about fatherhood than romance.

Well, Liv Tyler is his romantic interest, so it looks like there's plenty of both. The concept card being used to recruit for press screenings reads:

"If one woman can change your life imagine what three can do..."

In other words, Jennifer Lopez, Raquel Castro and Liv Tyler all have an effect on his life.

I'll post my review here on Friday or Saturday, after I see the film at one of the two screenings we're doing.

I get to go to a screening tomorrow, so Thursday night you'll see my feelings on it.

Cool. We're having one Thursday too, but it's at a theater where they're not playing Passion, so I was thinking of waiting for the Friday one.

Then again, maybe I could go tomorrow, and then go to the one on Friday, and then instead of seeing Jersey Girl again, I could just duck into Passion and then stay and see something else I haven't yet seen, like Master and Commander.

In Short (with apologies to Luigi ;) ): Touching, funny, beautiful. And these are words I never use lightly (except for 'funny').

First a correction: Little Gertie in the movie is 7, not 5.

What can I say about this movie? Best movie Kevin Smith has ever done? That's debatable, but there's no doubt that when it comes to family films, Kev has more talent than anyone gave him credit for. I normally avoid sappy sentimental flicks like this like the plauge, but this movie was truly touching. I even cried when Adult Gertie (played by Jennifer Lopez who did a great job, and no that's not a typo I really mean it) died in childbirth.

Affleck is a good actor. Shame he's done a lot of •••• lately, but this movie MORE than makes up for it. Honestly, anyone who blows off this great movie because of Gigli is an idiot. I know that sounds harsh, but I think that once you see this moive you'll agree.

George Carlin, Liv Tyler, Racquel Castro, and Stephen Root were great as the films supporting cast, and Jason Biggs was funny as Affleck's protege in the movie.

Notable Cameos: Jen Schwalbach (Kevin Smith's real life wife) as Ollie's (Affleck) assistant, Jason Lee & Matt Damon as Publicists, and *SPOLIER* Will Smith as Himself (He actually has arguably the most important scene in the movie).

Great Lines:

Ollie: Oh honey, those girls are only skinny because they're coked out whores.

Pop (George Carlin): Try being a father shithead!

More later. My fingers are frozen from standing at a snowy bus stop without a jacket or even a sweater (Hey, it was warm when I left the house!).

In brief: Pretty good. After two movies that ranged from scattershot and preachy to self-indulgent and puerile, Kevin Smith is back to form in his most sincere and heartfelt movie since Chasing Amy.

Written and Directed by Kevin Smith

Running time: 97 minutes (not counting closing credits)

---CAST:
Ben Affleck as Ollie Trinké
Racquel Castro as Gertie Trinké
Liv Tyler as Maya Harding
George Carlin as Bart “Pop” Trinké
Jennifer Lopez as Gertrude Steiney Trinké
Mike Starr as Block
Stephen Root as Greenie
Jason Biggs as Arthur Brickman
Jason Lee as PR Executive #1
Matt Damon as PR Executive #2
Will Smith as himself
S. Epatha Merkerson as Gertrude’s doctor

There’s a moment in the first half hour of Jersey Girl when Gertrude Steiney (Jennifer Lopez) stands in a Lamaze classroom as her husband Ollie Trinké (Ben Affleck) shows up late. As the other couples file out, Gertrude flat-out tells Ollie that he must understand that he’s no longer the “old” Ollie who used to be able to live at his office. He’s married now and has a kid on the way, and must understand that come evening, he must be out of the office to fulfill more domestic obligations. This mantra hangs over Ollie during the film, haunting him like Jiminy Cricket.

Ollie (no doubt named after DC’s Comics’ Green Arrow Oliver Queen, whose series Kevin Smith wrote a couple of years ago), is a New York PR agent with a talent for working crowds like maestro. He has a great West Side apartment, a father who lives in Jersey that he barely sees, and a gorgeous woman named Gertrude Steiney, another person at his PR firm. They meet, fall in love, and get married. Soon she’s pregnant, and things seem to be going great until tragedy strikes, which not only tears Ollie’s family apart, but his career and his professional reputation as well. His entire life changes as a result, and before long he’s working alongside his father as a Public Works employee in Highland, NJ, driving street sweepers and fixing water mains.

Ollie’s biggest problem, however isn’t that this life change occurs. It’s that he can’t seem to let go of his former life, and lives in the past, at times putting his attempts to get back into it ahead of his need to raise his daughter. He not only doesn’t realize how much Gertrude and Gertie change his life, he resists it. At one point in the film, Ollie is actually given a possible opportunity to return to his former life, but which will carry a cost to the other people in his life, including Maya Harding (Liv Tyler), a video store clerk with whom he becomes involved. The motif of a character having to choose to between a glamorous life of fame, wealth and power and the more emotionally rewarding life as a family man is obviously not new, but Smith manages to convey it sincerely by filtering it through his own point of experiences (he reportedly based the story on his experiences as a husband and father to daughter Harley Quinn), by avoiding an overabundance of cutesyness, and by treating some of the aspects of the story as the serious issues they are, such as the tragedy in the beginning of the film, and the resentment Ollie feels over how it has affected his life.

The dialogue is not as sharp as it was in Clerks or Chasing Amy, but this might be either because Smith has mellowed, or because his tendency for pop-culture irreverence is tempered somewhat by the need to realistically depict members of a family of various ages, and not wisecracking convenience store slackers, and this is for the best. Smith resists the urge to make George Carlin’s character talk like a standup comedian, instead creating a lovable but scruffy curmudgeon. Raquel Castro’s Gertie is adorable and smart-alecky without being an overly precocious sitcom character.

The movie is not as deep or edgy as Clerks or Chasing Amy, but that underscores the way it serves as a musing on the need to grow up and move on. If Clerks depicted the aimlessness and quasi-superiority exhibited by angry youths fearful of their future, and Chasing Amy the ambiguity of young professionals beginning to get a foothold in their careers while searching for long-term love, Jersey Girl is about man who can no longer stay on the fence between the pleasures of youth and the commitments of adulthood, and his need to make the important choices between the glamorous world of a fastlane career and the stability of a demanding home and family life. I recommend it.

---NITS & NOTES:
How great was the casting of Raquel Castro and the infant who played her as a baby? She is just ADORABLE! And the infant who played her looked just like Castro too!

When Ollie and Maya have a meal together in the diner, he tells her it’s been six years since he had sex, adding that it was when Gertie was born. I’m guessing it’d be a bit more than that, since he and Gertrude (Jennifer Lopez) probably stopped sometime during her pregnancy. Granted, it’s certainly possible that they continued to have relations all the way to the end of her pregnancy, but I doubt they fit the profile, given Gertrude’s self-consciousness over how her pregnancy affected her appearance, and given how skittish Ollie seems to be about sexual matters, as evidenced by how he deals with discovering Gertie and her school friend comparing their anatomies.

After we see Gertie as an infant for the first half hour or so of the movie, a title card introduces her as a 7 year-old, and Ollie tells Maya in the diner that it’s been seven years since she was born. We also know Ollie lost his job and his professional reputation sometime after Gertie’s birth (his father mentions he had been calling in sick to work to care for Gertie himself for three weeks, IIRC). But after Arthur manages to get him an interview with Angellotti, he mentions to everyone in the living room that this is an opportunity to get back into his former career “after 6 years of being a pariah.”

And why is Ollie bringing this up now? Why is he bringing this up in front of his father, girlfriend, daughter, and two guys that he adamantly states (twice) are not Gertie’s uncles? Isn’t this the sort of thing parents bring up discreetly, and only after the interview is successful?

Does anyone find it a bit unbelievable that Maya is writing a thesis? I’m no expert on graduate studies, but how can this girl find time to attend school, work at a video store, spend time with Ollie, and even participate in a class play?

To BrianW & Jake: Shouldn't you have placed a spoiler warning in that post when you discuss (highlight to read the rest Jennifer Lopez's death??? If I were reading that without having seen the film, I'd be pissed.

Correction: Ollie told Maya that it's been seven years since he had sex, not six, as I mentioned in my second NOTE above.

Another nit that I apparently missed when transcribing from my notes on March 4th: Why doens't Ollie just put in the infant Gertie in daycare in the beginning of the movie? Don't big corporations all have daycare centers nowadays, or even in 1994, when that portion of the film in set? (Of course, that might've precluded the major turning point in the plot.)