Jersey Girl (2004)

How sad is this?

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Oliver Trinke (Ben Affleck) is an up & coming music promoter. Its his job to whip up a frenzy for concerts and interviews. Although he is from "Joysey" , he works and lives in Manhattan with his beautiful wife, Gertrude (Jennifer Lopez), also a professional. They are expecting a baby and everyone is excited, including Ollie's Dad, Bart (George Carlin) , who runs the street sweeper in their NJ town. Sorrow suddenly descends, as Gertrude dies of an aneurysm giving birth to a daughter. Grieving greatly, Ollie parks his newborn daughter, also Gertie, with his Dad for the first month while he focuses on work. Naturally, this approach is a disaster and Ollie has a meltdown which gets him fired. Now, he must get to know his little girl and go limping back home to work in the same department as his Dad in Jersey. Flash forwarding seven years, Gertie is a spirited gal who charms even as she pushes buttons. Especially on her mind is a musical revue her class is doing for the parents; Gert insists they do a song from Sweeney Todd! Her dad will help her do it, with Gpa and his two closest friends also playing second fiddles. Meanwhile, Ollie has two new events in his life. One is the attractive sales clerk, Maya (Liv Tyler) at the video store who makes a pass at him. But, surprisingly, he also gets a job interview with a company similar to the one that fired him. Here is his chance to get back into a "classier", more exciting, more lucrative place in life. Or is it so? This movie, written and directed by Kevin Smith of Clerks and Chasing Amy, has its charms and humor. Especially wonderful is Affleck, Lopez, Carlin, Tyler, and little Raquel Castro as the younger Gert. Also nice is the Jersey scenery and the edgy talk and themes. Since all of us romcom fans have to "look back in time" to find new delights, I heartily recommend searching for this one.

Ollie Trinkie (Ben Affleck) is a big time music publicist. Her wife Gertrude (Jennifer Lopez) is pregnant. Everything is great until Gertrude dies in childbirth. Ollie is over his head, and in frustration, he ridicules his new client Will Smith's music in a big public blowup. He's fired, and moves back in with his cranky father (George Carlin) in New Jersey. The movie then picks back up 7 years later. Ollie and his girl Gertie (Raquel Castro) meets young videostore clerk MPDG Maya (Liv Tyler).This starts off awkwardly. JLo is in this for 15 minutes and she dies right away. It's not funny even with the standard diaper changing scene. The movie really doesn't get going until the kid arrive. She's a spunky cutie. I would definitely cut out the first part if Kevin Smith intends on making this a rom-com. There's no point in showing JLo other than in angelic flashbacks. Kevin Smith needs to get to Liv Tyler much faster. She generates most of the funniest moments in this movie.All of this is a moot point. The fact is the movie was killed by the breakup of Affleck and JLo. It never had a chance.

I had, for some months, the DVD of Kevin Smith's JERSEY GIRL totally abandoned on the shelf; I used to think of it as a bad Kevin Smith so I pretty much forgot it. I mean, Ben Affleck *and* Jennifer Lopez as the couple, certainly, of a more serious, sort-of different Kevin Smith movie? This was actually the very first adventure for Smith outside of his View Askewniverse, you know, without Jason Mewes as Jay and himself as Silent Bob; going to a different direction is always difficult and creates a sort-of hostile expectation amongst the fans – you add to that a storyline with the stars of GIGLI, which was released just seven months before, and hell, is easy to see why it was a complete box-office failure. That storyline (although the DVD never mentions something about Lopez; only that she "also stars") makes you choose any day something like COP OUT instead! However, I'm happy to report this was nothing like COP OUT (another direction change for Smith: *the* film he directed but didn't write, back in 2010), which remains as the only true bad Kevin Smith flick in my book – I have yet to watch DOGMA though, but I'm sure it's going to be a blast for me.Anyway, I sat down to watch JERSEY GIRL because I was doing a school project about public relations. I connect everything with cinema, so my idea of a public relations class included a film about the subject or at least a bunch of clips of some movies. I wasn't going to have much time during the class so I went for the second idea – and for that I began checking lists with the best PR films around. Films like WAG THE DOG, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, JERRY MAGUIRE, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, THE CORPORATION, NETWORK and, surprise surprise, JERSEY GIRL were the ones often mentioned in those lists. I had already the DVDs of some, so needless to say is that one Sunday afternoon I grabbed a couple of them and emerged myself into a fine evening with public relations pictures. I watched, back-to-back, Sydney Lumet's NETWORK and this one; it was a fine evening indeed and just the best possible way to do some school work!Back to JERSEY GIRL, well, the film is all set after the death of Jennifer Lopez's character. This is a big spoiler, I know, but it's also a way to say "Don't worry. The Bennifer thing only goes for the first minutes of the film. This isn't GIGLI. Watch it". I like to think in that as an analogy to say this is a bad Kev Smith movie only on the paper – that analogy will not work for fans of Ms. Lopez, certainly, but who cares. Actually, this is pure Kevin Smith in some ways, leaving COP OUT and RED STATE (which, by the way, wasn't bad, just not very memorable) as the only "different" material in his body of work. Let me put it in this way: JERSEY GIRL is about Ben Affleck as a single father raising his child, after losing his wife, his fancy PR job and moving from New York to New Jersey; it starts off as a tragedy but later on you'll have Affleck going with his daughter to rent some movies and getting for himself some porn; we have him also bashing Will Smith, the musical CATS and the movie DIRTY DANCING… so, he's all right with me here. Add to that a very funny cameo of both Jason Lee and Matt Damon and, yes, you'll have some classic Kevin Smith material. The film is nevertheless formulaic, but it offers cool elements (and George Carlin) to balance that issue. For example, we have Affleck bashing Will Smith during the whole movie, like I said, and when it comes the time for Affleck to do the right thing and win back the girl (in this case his daughter), well, there you have him hearing some advice from Will Smith himself. PS (spoilers): after watching the film I went on to youtube to get the clips I had chosen for my PR class. That search took me to some great videos from the AN EVENING WITH KEVIN SMITH DVD. If you haven't seen those you need to rush, as Smith's stories are fantastic, especially the ones dealing with his never-completed SUPERMAN project and Tim Burton. Smith says that he was totally surprised when he saw the ending of Burton's PLANET OF THE APES since in the CHASING DOGMA comic books there was a very similar thing with apes taking down the Lincoln memorial. Burton was later very p*ssed off with the insinuation that he had stolen something from Smith. As a fun fact, in JERSEY GIRL one of the cool elements we have is a thing about the SWEENY TODD play; *spoiler alert* Affleck's daughter actually does a school representation of Sweeny Todd. How funny is that 3 years later Burton himself released the movie version of that play? In Smith's very own words: "great minds think alike, motherf*****!" *Watched it on 16 September, 2012

this movie is so good that you can imagine by the thing thats it made me write my first ever review !!! no if's no but .. if you are into too much love with your parents go & watch the movie asap ... don't miss it .... best movie to describe parental love .. very touching made my heart cry out .. lovely acting by every characteri wish now that i had daughter especially after watching this movie ... hats off too story writer .. the concept the directing everything was amazing ... & giving the Maya character to story was too good ....best movie in a good time !!!! i loved it like hell"dont you dare miss it " ... best ever touching movie ...