- Yep, we know that some of you lucky folks have gotten their discs in the past 2 days, but we, unfortunately, had to wait until today, the official release date. Anyway, Chris just called to tell me he’s got the disc and we’re PSYCHED! Fans who have written us so far tell us that the disc is outstanding. The commentary track is supposedly excellent, not to mention all the extras on (and within) the disc, including the View Askew time line, a map of the film’s locations, and of course all those extra scenes & outtakes that you can’t get anywhere else. If you’ve got a laserdisc player, GO BUY THIS DISC!!! If not, go buy a laserdisc player, THEN GO BUY THIS DISC!!!
You are at the archive for the Chasing Amy category &rarr
Amy Tops More Charts…
- Thanks to Gramp for letting us know that Chasing Amy has made the top 10 of two more charts, according to Microsoft Cinemania. Critics Andy Klien and Leonard Maltin both put the flick in their top 10. For the curious here’s their complete lists:
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| 1 … L.A. Confidential | 1 … CHASING AMY | ||
| 2 … Lost Highway | 2 … Boogie Nights | ||
| 3 … Schizopolis | 3 … As Good As It Gets | ||
| 4 … Face/Off | 4 … L.A. Confidential | ||
| 5 … Men In Black | 5 … Donnie Brasco | ||
| 6 … Happy Together | 6 … Titanic | ||
| 7 … Amistad | 7 … La Promesse | ||
| 8 … Deconstructing Harry | 8 … Deconstructing Harry | ||
| 9 … CHASING AMY | 9 … The Sweet Hereafter | ||
| 10 .. Hercules | 10 .. The Full Monty |
Tarantino Digs “Amy”…
- We’ve gotten a few e-mails from people who spotted Quentin Tarantino on the “Charlie Rose Show” the other night. When asked what his favorite movie of the year was, he said “Chasing Amy”! We’ve looked all around for an actual transcript of the show, but we came up empty. If you can find one, please e-mail us! In the meantime, here’s a few scooper’s summaries of the whole incident..
1Chasing Amy being named to those Top Ten lists is an honor, but tonight Iheard the biggest honor I’ve heard yet. On the Charlie Rose Show (a highly respected interview program on PBS), Quentin Tarantino was on and was asked what the best film of the year was. Almost without hesitation he said,”Chasing Amy”!!! He said that that was the film that “stuck” with him the most of everything he’s seen this year. He even talked about Kevin for a moment also, praising him for making it. He said something to the effect that it was the biggest turn he ever saw a director take, and that he couldn’t believe he put such an intense personal story on the screen. Don’t quote me, but that was the gist of it. Another major critic was on and agreed with Tarantino as well. I was psyched to hear it, as I’m sure your readers will be as well. [Dave Bednar]
2Hey, love the site…I saw QT on Charlie Rose today (12/24) in a round table with 3 film critics. When asked their fave flicks of the year, one critic said “Titanic,” one said “L.A. Confidential” and one said “Chasing Amy”. Charlie started to go to another subject when Q said, “Wait, I didn’t get to say my favorite.” When queried, he replied,”Chasing Amy”. I can’t quote him exactly, but he said he liked it because 1) it stuck with him and 2) Kevin Smith made such a big jump with this flick he must’ve gotten a nosebleed. He said some more nice stuff about it, but I can’t remember. In non-Askew news, he also explained his flick (Jackie Brown) to the 3 critics, none of whom really liked it, saying it was too long. It was a slightly tense moment and I was waiting for him to punch someone, but he was like Fonzie. [Rob Unck]
More Honors For “Chasing Amy”…
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| 1 … L.A. Confidential | 1 … Boogie Nights | ||
| 2 … Ponette | 2 … Lost Highway | ||
| 3 … CHASING AMY | 3 … CHASING AMY | ||
| 4 … In The Company Of Men | 4 … All Over Me | ||
| 5 … Oscar And Lucinda | 5 … The Last Time I Committed Suicide | ||
| 6 … Face/Off | 6 … Hard Eight | ||
| 7 … Amistad | 7 … Waiting For Guffman | ||
| 8 … Eve’s Bayou | 8 … The Daytrippers | ||
| 9 … Welcome to Sarajevo | 9 … Star Wars Trilogy (Re-Release) | ||
| 10 .. Gabbeh | 10 .. Trojan War | ||
| [Sent In By Gramp] | [Sent In By Nolan Reese] |
More On “Amy” Disc…
- Kevin Brophy sent us this encouraging news about the release date of the Amy Disc :
With all the dates bandied about for the laserdisc release of Chasing Amy, I was surprised to find my laserdisc supplier updated their Web site with this specific date: December 17 – one week after the original December 10. I don’t know where they got their date, but until yesterday, they were still listing the 10th.
Come on Criterion, we need this disc out by January 5 so Chris can get it signed!
“Chasing Amy” Laserdisc…
- Criterion’s website now reports that the super-deluxe “Chasing Amy” Disc has a street-date of December 1997. Let’s hope it’s out in time for Vulgarthon! Scoop courtesy of Garett.
Chasing Amy Hits U.S. Video Shelves
- We’re happy to announce that “Chasing Amy”, Kevin Smith’s 3rd film, is now available on video shelves for RENTAL across the country here in the U.S. NOW you can watch the Jersey trilogy AND play all 3 of the View Askew drinking games in the comfort of your own home! If anyone “plays the trilogy” and lives, do drop us a line and let us know. Oh, and enjoy the movie. If you haven’t seen it, what are you waiting for!?!? And if you have, go rent it and watch it again.
Entertainment Weekly’s COMPLETE Amy Review
- We just got a hold of the entire text of Entertainment Weekly’s “Chasing Amy” review. It’s pretty harsh for a magazine that spent a lot of time praising the film at its release. Here it is. Sorry for the delay in getting this up, but we had some local server trouble today.
SAY EVERYTHING
Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy is merely the most notorious of a trio of recent gabfests from the mouths of baby directors.
By Mike D’Angelo
Pity, if you can, the aspiring young filmmaker. On the one hand, twentysomething scribes want to heed the oft-heard maxim “Write what you know.” On the other, what most of them know isn’t exactly dazzling: college dorm rooms, the corner video store, Schoolhouse Rock, and late-night bull sessions about…well, college, videos, and Schoolhouse Rock. Dialogue comes easily to them after years of mentally filing conversational fillips, but telling stories cinematically is another matter entirely.
No movie better epitomizes this chattering genre than Walking and Talking, winner of 1996’s award for Most Accurate Title. The characters in Nicole Holofcener’s feature debut do virtually nothing but walk and talk; even gum chewing would tax their resources. To be fair, this is an accomplished rendition of the story being penned by so many recent film-school grads (Holofcener attended Columbia): Best friends struggle to come to terms with adult responsibilities but find their relationship threatened by a Disruptive Event (in this case, an impending wedding). Leads Catherine Keener and Anne Heche banter skillfully, and a subplot in which a lovestruck video-store clerk (Kevin Corrigan) seduces one of them, only to discover moments later that she’s been referring to him as the Ugly Guy, is surprisingly moving. Holofcener’s functional style, however–a nonstop series of close-ups and two-shots–makes Walking less like a movie than a pilot for a nifty TV series about female friendship.
Is it possible to make a Talker worth looking at? Yes. Noah Baumbach’s little-seen Kicking and Screaming (1995), about four new grads who’ll stop at nothing to avoid entering the real world, traffics in the usual now-what? insecurities, but his dialogue is unusually distinctive (sullen guy to girlfriend: “Well, I haven’t been-to-Prague been to Prague, but I know that thing, I know that stop-shaving-your-armpits, read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, fall-in-love-with-a-sculptor, now-I-know-how-bad-American-coffee-is thing”). More important, Baumbach occasionally halts the conversation and lets the camera tell the story. One of the film’s best jokes, in fact, is unspoken: Max (Chris Eigeman) kicks shards of broken glass into a pile, carefully balances a sheet of paper reading “broken glass” atop it, and casually walks out of the room. To his credit, Baumbach understands that a scene like this can convey as much about a person’s state of mind as five minutes of witty banter.
Let’s hope that Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats) figures that out in time for his next picture, because Chasing Amy (suggested alternate title: Chasing and Aiming), his ambitiously garrulous new-to-tape release, is as cinematically inept as it is dramatically audacious. A love story with a twist–a comic-book artist named Holden (Ben Affleck) falls in love with Alyssa, a lesbian (Joey Lauren Adams) who returns his affection–it features plenty of Smith’s trademark foulmouthed riffs, the strongest performances of any of his films to date (though Adams is sometimes a bit shrill), and an appealing and sometimes genuinely affecting romantic streak. For the first time, Smith actually appears to give a damn about his characters’ predicaments and neuroses; when Holden impulsively blurts out his love for Alyssa halfway through the film, the smart-ass posturing abruptly halts and an astonishing (for Smith) maturity takes over. Amy is also refreshingly gutsy in its subversive take on the bond between Holden and his best friend and business partner, Banky (Jason Lee), a mild homophobe who may well be deeply in denial.
Trouble is, Smith has now made three films without yet demonstrating that he has the slightest idea of how to wield a movie camera. His idea of ingenuity is to have his characters throw darts at the camera, or to none too subtly intercut the emotional violence of an argument at a hockey game with the violence in the rink. That he’s hardly alone in this inadequacy is small consolation. It’s time for the next generation of auteurs to demonstrate that they can walk the walk as well as talk the talk.
Walking and Talking: B-
Kicking and Screaming: A-
Chasing Amy: B-
Also, if you’re interested, read that article about Kev and Guin that we mentioned yesterday.
Did Kevin Smith date a lesbian?
What do you get when you put a couple of straight New Jersey guys and two urban lesbians together in a condo in Utah? According to filmmaking lore– Chasing Amy. It was January 1994 when the Go Fish girls, beautiful cowriter-star Guinevere Turner and her former lover and cowriter-director, Rose Troche, met the Clerks boys, director-star Kevin Smith and producer Scott Mosier, at Sundance. Both teams had festival hits, and both had made, in Smith’s words, “grungy little black-and-white films that were very concerned with sex.” They became fast friends–“I would drag Rose over to their condo, and we’d have endless conversations,” Turner says–and when Smith’s boy-meets-lesbian, boy-makes-it-with-lesbian story was released three years later, the rumors came with it: Guin had slept with Kevin. Or “Kevin couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t. He was obsessed, so he wrote the script,” as one New York production source recalls the folklore.
As usual, the truth is more complicated. Going on record on the subject for the first time, Turner says they’re all friends–that’s all. At Sundance the four had “a cultural exchange.” “We really got along and learned probably too much about each other,” she says. “They’d be like, ‘So, do you like women who look like men, or do you go out with really hot chicks?'”
But a crush on Guin? No way, says Smith. Mosier, however, fesses up: “It was like falling in love with your third-grade teacher–it’s impossible.” Except in the movies. Put-your-life-on-screen king Smith advised Mosier to write about his infatuation. Then, says Smith, “I thought, I should write that script,” and melded it with “a snapshot of my relationship with Joey [Lauren Adams, who plays Alyssa],” with whom Smith has since broken up.
Turner is clear about the moment the film deviates from personal history: “[Alyssa] turns straight in the middle of the movie. That’s not something that happens all the time.” So no rain-soaked declarations of hetero love? “The way I live it,” Turner explains, lesbianism “is a given, not a conflict.” Smith, however, is incorrigible. To this day he likes to remind Turner of the nuptial scene in Go Fish. Says Turner, “He’s like, ‘You look so good in a wedding dress,’ and I [say], ‘So do a lot of chicks.'” –Allison Gaines
Chasing Amy Release Info…
- Just to clear a few things up, Chasing Amy WILL be out on video on Novemeber 25th, as this site reported from the very beginning. The kickass Criterion LD release WAS scheduled for December 10th, but we’ve just heard from an inside source that that’s been pushed back to Tuesday, January 7th, 1998. Sorry to report that, but that’s just what Criterion does. Believe us, we’re JUST as upset as you are. Anyway, back to the video release: Our local BlockBuster video will be getting a whopping 33 COPIES, so you shouldn’t have much trouble finding it for rental. This is pretty unheard of for a 12 million dollar film, but a good sign for sure! Finally, this tape will NOT be available for sale for at least 6 months, most likely. So just rent it and enjoy, or wait for the laser!
“Amy” Write-Up In “Video Business”
- Video Business Magazine, a weekly publication that we recevive FREE (so can you!) has a small write-up on “Chasing Amy” to promote its Novemeber 25th release. Subscribe Here! It’s free! Here’s the piece:
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Chasing Amy
Comedy, Color, R (language, sexual situations), 113 min. PPV: 55 days, copy-protected, CC, VHS rental priced, Laser $39.99 Street: Nov. 25; Prebook: Nov. 4 Cast : Ben Affleck (Mallrats), Joey Lauren Adams (Michael), Jason Lee (Weapons Of Mass Distraction), Dwight Ewell (Flirt) Director: Kevin Smith BUENA VISTA (MIRAMAX) |
Story Line: Buddies and business partners Holden (Affleck) and Banky (Lee) are the artists behind Bluntman And Chronic, an adult comic book with a growing readership. When Holden falls for fellow comicbook artist Alyssa (Adams), who is a lesbian, he persists in dating her despite Banky’s warning that he’s risking their friendship.
Bottom Line: Director Smith bounces back from poorly receivedMallrats with an origianl look at life and love among hip young urbanites — actually Jerseyites — struggling in lower manhattan and its environs. These are Smith’s Clerks idlers five years later, when adulthood can no longer be avoided. Although Holden’s life does indeed fall apart as the effervescent Alyssa upsetes all the rules. Chasing Amy presents the young man’s highs and lows as a vital part of emotional growth. A high-profile theatrical release and a slew of press guarantee this one to be a hot renter from the start. One caution: The sex talk is couched in frank street language and may shock some sensibilities.
— Andy Wickstrom (Executive Editor)