Chasing Amy

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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.

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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