- The press continues, and we’ve got it all here for ya. We’ll kick it off with a fantastic piece from USA Today (including the revelation
that Kev may have just given up smoking!), and just keep rollin’ on from there. We’ll run reviews separately, the stuff that follows will just involve
interviews or press pieces on the movie and/or the cast. Let’s get the party started:
…He says of Jersey Girl, “If somebody put a gun to my head and said, ‘Make one kind of movie for the rest of your life,’ it would be more of this. This is what comes natural to me. You scrape away the sex and fart jokes and the cynicism of the other movies, and you find a romantic underneath.”
The timing couldn’t be better for Smith to play to a more mature crowd, given the outbreak of conservatism that has gripped the country after Janet Jackson’s breast-baring Super Bowl stunt. “Thank God I wasn’t promoting Dogma right about now,” he says. “I’d be up a creek.”
He didn’t have to struggle too hard to sanitize his script. “You take Jay and Silent Bob out of any flick, and 75% of it is going to go clean immediately.” But Smith retains his knack for shock humor: Affleck’s character refers to the long-running Broadway musical Cats as “the second-worst thing to happen to New York.” Yes, it’s a World Trade Center joke.
“It’s very subtle,” he says, smiling somewhat sheepishly. “I don’t know if anybody picks up on it.” The line pre-9/11 was “the worst thing.” Afterward, “I tailored it back. Then I thought, ‘Is that kind of tacky? No, it’s in keeping with what I said in the past.’ ”
MIAMI HERALD – “One from the Heart”
Q: The most surprising thing about Jersey Girl is that it reveals what a softie you are. Who knew?
A: I’m a sap for movies like this. I didn’t really grow up watching hardcore indie stuff. That came later in life. I grew up watching movies like this, because my Mom was into them. I’m a huge fan of Terms of Endearment.
Q: It’s also a very straightforward and earnest movie. Even though it’s often very funny, there’s no cynicism or irony in it whatsoever.
A: It doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It’s chock-full of clichés, and it had the potential to become one big cliché. It’s how you handle those conventions that makes all the difference. School of Rock is a great example. I don’t know that I would have necessarily dug that movie in someone else’s hands. But [director] Richard Linklater did something with it that I thought was real interesting and cool. It’s nice to see a dude whose work I’ve always admired do something in a very familiar genre but bring his particular flavor to it.
Q: You’ve described Jersey Girl as your most personal film. But isn’t comedy, by its very nature, extremely personal? The particular things we laugh at are very revealing of our personalities and who we are.
A: I’d agree with that. Some of the comedy that I’ve done — and I’m certainly not disowning it by any stretch of the imagination — is stuff that I find funny and can observe, but I’m not really a part of it. I’m not a stoner and have never been a stoner. I love sex and I love talking about it with my friends, but I’m not like obsessed with sex. The characters in my movies are, because it’s much funnier to play that out on the page.
But if someone held a gun to my head and said I could only write one kind of script for the rest of my life, it would be more like this one, because this is closer to who I am and the stuff I really enjoy. I’m the dude who loves movies about grief and where people die. That stuff is actually easier for me to write than the comedy.
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES – “Jersey boy Kevin Smith gets personal, but not too serious”
…”At any given moment, people could be like, ‘Hey, the emperor has no f—–‘ clothes!’ and suddenly you’re out on your ass,” Smith said. “So I try not to treat it very seriously, and it’s not a cure for f—–‘ cancer by any stretch of the imagination. You just hope to connect with an audience. You hope to move them, you hope to make ’em laugh. You hope that the movie means something to them.”
If it doesn’t, if they deem it crap and bluntly tell him so (as a number of bitter souls have), he’s hurt. Fame and wealth have brought lots of things, but thicker skin isn’t one of them.
“If it’s good criticism, like, well-thought out, I don’t take it personally,” he said. “But I do tend to take the s— that’s like, ‘You’re a hack and this s— blows!’ very personally. And I don’t know why. ‘Cause that’s not really criticism. It’s somebody trying to get under your skin. And that’s the stuff you should be able to blow off easily, but unfortunately that’s not the case. It’s the stuff you wind up dwelling on. It finds the chinks in your armor.
“I don’t know about other people, but I know I sit there going, ‘I suck, I blow, I’m a hack,’ in the wee small hours of the morning, or in the dark. And so when somebody nails it on the head and nails your insecurities on the head, it really draws blood.”
With his most heartfelt work to date debuting shortly on hundreds of screens across America, Smith is doubtless due for another round of pummeling. Alas, all he’ll have to blunt the blows are a loving family, fans galore, piles of cash, a Tinseltown casa and global fame.
THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS – “Jersey Guy”
…But Jay and Silent Bob fans shouldn’t feel abandoned. The comedy tag team, which features Jason Mewes as the motor-mouthed Jay and Smith as his silent partner Bob, should strike back again soon.
“I told Mewes if he would get and stay clean, I would think about going back into Jay and Silent Bob country,” Smith says. “On April 6, he will have been clean and sober for a year, off booze and drugs. So hopefully, Mewes can stay on point and yeah, we’ll think about heading in that direction again.”
TV GUIDE – “Meet J.Lo’s ‘Daughter'”
…”I’m hoping that, after this movie, people will realize who I am,” she giddily says, “because I like signing autographs. I want to be able to go to the mall and McDonald’s and everything, but I want to sign autographs because it looks pretty cool.”
The fourth-grader has been diligently practicing, just in case adoring fans start asking for her John Hancock. “I can write in cursive,” she declares proudly. “I learned how when I was in third grade. [My signature] is not like people usually do it. I do it nice and you can understand it. But I want to learn how to [sign my name] fast, like Ben does.”
THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS – “Jersey Guy”
…But Jay and Silent Bob fans shouldn’t feel abandoned. The comedy tag team, which features Jason Mewes as the motor-mouthed Jay and Smith as his silent partner Bob, should strike back again soon.
“I told Mewes if he would get and stay clean, I would think about going back into Jay and Silent Bob country,” Smith says. “On April 6, he will have been clean and sober for a year, off booze and drugs. So hopefully, Mewes can stay on point and yeah, we’ll think about heading in that direction again.”
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER – “Publicist to the Stars Poised for Stardom”
“I wanted to make Tony Angellotti the most famous publicist in the world — short of having him hit someone with a car, a la Lizzie Grubman,” Smith said Wednesday while riding next to his soon-to-be famous spokesman. “I wanted to do it a bit more peacefully. And he kind of balked at the idea of hitting someone with a car, but that’s how publicists get famous. You have to hit people.”
The filmmaker spared a few lives by inserting the Angellotti company — Tony’s Studio City-based entertainment marketing and PR firm — into his upcoming Miramax Films release. The scene finds Ben Affleck (news)’s character in the middle of the Angellotti company’s glamorous (and very movielike) Manhattan offices for a job interview.
“We put an Angellotti office onscreen as if it were sculpted from God’s own bathroom,” Smith joked. “But did we spell it right or wrong?” he asked as he turned to Tony in the car, “Oh yeah, we did. Good.”
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