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Reviews:
Love:
Kevin Smith Style: Chasing
Amy
by
Christian De Matteo
Solid
If, after I’d watched Clerks for the first time, you’d told me writer/director Kevin
Smith would go on to make a romantic comedy
where the love parts weren’t all funny and
were often quite deep, I’d have told you
he couldn’t do it.
While Smith’s brilliance is clear
in Clerks,
realistic love doesn’t seem like a natural
byproduct of his work.
Had I said that, I would stand here now corrected.
Luckily I didn’t say that, so you
can all take your “I told you so”-ing
asses home and screw off.
Sorry… got caught up in the moment.
Regardless, Chasing Amy pulls off its love story so successfully, that the
viewer becomes totally involved in the
story, even to the point where I was
profaning the screen (not “gay-bashing the
TV” necessarily as Jason Lee does so well,
but merely tossing one foul word after
another at it).
I rarely get that involved in a
romantic comedy.
The problem with romantic comedies, as I’ve
discussed in some review somewhere before,
is that they are so damn formulaic that
nothing matters.
Boy meets girl… you know exactly
what happens after that.
Smith takes the road less traveled
from the get-go, making his formula Boy
meets Lesbian… and you really can’t
predict where it will go from there.
Could be Boy meets Lesbian and she
smacks him, The End; or Boy meets Lesbian
and she invites him to join her on her
trysts (and the censors go wild!), The End;
or Boy meets Lesbian and she falls in love
with him and… it could still go anywhere.
Now this, of course doesn’t mean
that this new twist makes the romantic
comedy infallible, that it will be good no
matter which road it takes.
Quite the opposite, this twist sets
us up for something new and exciting and it
damn well better deliver.
And deliver Amy
does, serving up laughs as well as a
plethora of other real life emotions we
don’t normally feel for the screen.
Smith writes love strongly, not sappy
and sticky but in that real way that you
might remember feeling from that time you
fell in love with a lesbian… or anyone for
that matter.
He’s never heavy handed but when it
comes time for the waterworks he pulls them
off raw, no posturing or pretense, almost
filming a breakup most of us have had.
And his actors can handle it.
Affleck and Adams have wonderful
chemistry, two imperfects who’ve found
each other in a confusing world and love and
muddle their way through it.
Ben Affleck (Good Will Hunting, Dogma)
is exactly that goofy/cool sometimes too
cocky guy you know who everyone likes but
not to the point of idle worship.
No, everyone feels comfortable
telling him he’s a jackass when he needs
it. Affleck
handles this part well, so well in fact, we
dislike him and even hate him for his
decisions sometimes because they are so
realistically stupid.
“How could you think that’s a
good idea,” we think, but are angry
because it’s damn possible we’ve made a
similarly stupid one ourselves.
The movie is frustrating at times
because Kevin Smith won’t give the
characters the benefit of the doubt and does
show them doing the dumbest thing they could
do, not because they’re stupid, but
because they’re young, inexperienced and
emotional. Been there, done that.
Joey Lauren Adams also very successfully plays her
part, a formally very confused, but now
settling woman, with some still to learn,
now with the concrete beginning to harden
around her foundation.
She’s fun, honest, giggly and tough
all in such away that you think, well, of
course he’d fall in love with her.
Smith, also being a man who knows how to use his
non-cardboard supporting players, weaves a
tale as complex and bizarre as life usually
gets, remembering to comment on the mundane
along with the sublime and tugging
everything perfectly back to the gutter when
it starts aiming too high.
Nothing in Chasing Amy is lofty.
Amy
is nowhere near as funny as Clerks
or even Dogma, but it is a very worthy.
Watch both for those caught up in the
Jersey mythos and those in search of a new
twist on an old formula.
Smith’s writing is always hip
without being fake and often hysterical with
its comments on life and pop culture
references. Keep an eye out for the Jaws
and Star
Wars jokes, and enjoy this quirky and
realistic love story.
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Chasing
Amy
by
Joe De Matteo
Pathetic
So, maybe it isn’t fair that I
pan this movie.
The fact is, I didn’t watch it.
I sat down to watch it.
I got snack food and sat down to
watch it.
I got an adult beverage, snack food
and sat down to watch it.
I actually got as far as having my
feet up on the coffee table, the snack
bowl in my lap and the beer on the arm of
the couch; I even had my headphones on.
But I couldn’t get through the
opening credits.
To paraphrase an old movie cliché,
“I got a bad feeling about it.”
It was so bad in fact that this
movie couch potato turned it off, took my
snacks into another room and read “The
Brethren” for three and a half hours.
I’m no Ben Affleck fan.
What I don’t like about him is
exactly the reason that I wasn’t turned
off by his being in Armageddon (a
great film), or in Dogma.
So for me it wasn’t Chasing
Amy, it was Running Away From Amy.
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