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This was a nice "break" (sort of, not really) from the View Askew series, but still in the Kevin Smith wheelhouse. His comedy was definitely in here, but there were many feels throughout. Def wasn't expecting this to be so relatable tbh.

Click here to watchalong with me!

I mention it in the video, but for people who don't watch intro's or reviews - I'll be watching Zack and Miri as well! Date TBD, but it will be done.

Please enjoy! Looking forward to your comments.

✦ KL

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Tyler Foster

As with many people currently in their mid-to-late 30s, I grew up on Kevin Smith's movies. Here was a guy who was also a huge nerd who wore his influences on his sleeve and had the kinds of conversations you have with your friends...well, maybe, anyway, if you were a hetero cis guy. However, if Smith has a weakness, it's that being funny is at least in part a defense mechanism against being not conventionally attractive, and I don't know if he's ever grown out of that. Like many of those people, such as myself, that he was speaking to, being self-deprecating was a way to mask a sentimentality that many people, especially those hetero cis guys, worry would make them less cool than they're already convinced they are. Once Jersey Girl gets into the meat of the story after the time jump, it really feels like "the road not traveled" for Smith to me: an imperfect but relatively sincere movie about actual adult themes. The guy lost his dad, and was raising a daughter (his wife appears as that woman who's "never even seen an infant" at the disastrous press conference), and he put that into his art in a way that actually felt mostly mature (although there are still a few bits where his love of crude humor creeps in here, like Lopez's dialogue about everyone being skinny coke whores, or Will's random aside about being hung, and this is more why Liv Tyler propositioning Affleck feels weird to me than any discomfort he has -- it feels like a teenage fantasy more than a conversation between ostensible adults). Honestly, I kind of wish he had left the View Askew-niverse behind (with one exception -- I would've watched any number of seasons of the "Clerks" cartoon) and made more movies like Jersey Girl. For a few years, when the DVD boom was at an all-time high, Smith was well-known for doing 10th anniversary editions, starting with Clerks X, which I once mentioned has one of the best documentaries ever created for home video, The Snowball Effect, although it does feature positive comments and even an on-camera interview with Harvey Weinstein. He also managed to do a 10th anniversary DVD of Mallrats and a 10th anniversary Blu-ray of Chasing Amy, but by the time the 10th anniversary of Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob rolled around, nothing really came of it. Jersey Girl was probably the last time he expressed plans on doing a 10th anniversary edition that never happened, and in the case of this movie, he did do at least some of the work, albeit closer to the 20th anniversary of the movie than the 10th. Last year, on May 28th, at the Smodcastle Cinemas in Highlands, NJ, he unveiled "Jersey Girl: The Snyder Cut," which restored the film to something closer to his original script. Apparently, this mainly means that Lopez is in it for the entire first act, with the relationship playing out for longer than the opening credits. Although no plans have been announced, I think there's at least a reasonable chance that this could actually come out on video eventually. I'd definitely be interested in seeing it.

Tyler Foster

Just read a friend's LBX review of the long cut and they show the water main speech instead of cutting to a montage!

matt

It's hard for me to watch a 2000s Ben Affleck movie and not think of him as Daredevil.