6.4 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 3.2 |
Ollie Trinkie is a publicist, who has a great girlfriend, Gertrude, whom he marries and they are expecting a baby but while he is looking forward to being a father, he doesn't lighten his workload. Gertrude gives birth but dies in the process. Ollie doesn't live up to his responsibilities as a father. Eventually the strain and pressure of losing his wife and being a father gets to him and he has breakdown, which leads to his termination. So with nothing much to do he tries to be good father to his daughter, Gertie. He also meets a young woman name Maya, who likes him but he is still not over his wife.
Starring: Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, George Carlin, Stephen Root, Mike StarrComedy | 100% |
Romance | 47% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.44:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
None
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 2.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Oh, for the storied days of Bennifer—no, not the current one, which is clad in the golden hues of domestic bliss and Oscars, but Bennifer 1.0, the fabled pairing of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. If Art imitates Life, we might have at least a peek at what an actual Affleck-Lopez union could have been like in Jersey Girl, the Ishtar of Kevin Smith films, an outing which received a lot of critical brickbats back in the day, many of them leveled at least as much at Ben and J. Lo and their “love affair” as anything actually in the film. Smith is not exactly celebrated for his touch-feely qualities, and that may have been as much to blame as anything for Jersey Girl’s rather spectacular failure at the time of its theatrical release, for throngs of Smith fans were probably hoping for another Clerks or Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. In fact Jersey Girl is perhaps more reminiscent of Chasing Amy, positing a slowly developing relationship between radically different characters and doing so without an excess of snark or vitriol. This was the first of Smith’s films not to be set (overtly or otherwise) in what has been termed the View Askewniverse, that alternate reality of sorts which is both tethered to Smith’s east coast roots but which is distinctly unique and typically features such outré characters as Jay and Silent Bob. Whether that also added to the disappointment that Smith aficionados especially felt is debatable, but the fact is Jersey Girl was uncommonly reviled in 2004, and as the second in a one-two filmic punch against Bennifer (the other being the even more reviled Gigli), it is “credited”, rightly or wrongly, with having helped to bring an early end to one of the most storied romances of our time (not).
Jersey Girl is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Miramax and Echo Bridge Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.44:1. Echo Bridge regularly gets raked over the coals for its Blu-ray offerings, but Jersey Girl looks rather good overall, with good fine object detail in close-ups, nicely saturated and accurate looking color and a generally crisp and clear looking image. The elements here are in excellent condition, and the only niggling complaint some may have is some spotty contrast issues which occasionally hobble some of the darker interior scenes. This film was lensed by the legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Heaven's Gate), a perhaps unlikely sounding choice, but one which invests this kind of tired effort with some unexpected visual allure, albeit in somewhat drab environments.
Jersey Girl features two serviceable if rather standard sounding lossless audio options, one in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and the other a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo fold down. The best part of the sound mix here is the great use of source cues, which vary from Bruce Springsteen to Stephen Sondheim (the film ends with a spectacularly improbable grade school staging of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street). Some of the larger scenes, like the PR event touting Will Smith in Independence Day , nicely engage the surrounds to create a fantastically lifelike hall ambience full of lot of hustle and bustle, but the great bulk of this film is quieter dialogue scenes, which are pretty resolutely anchored front and center. Fidelity remains excellent, while dynamic range is (as should be expected) rather limited.
Jersey Girl is probably not as horrible as a lot of critics made it out to be at the time of its release, but that doesn't mean it's very good, either. There are little sparks here and there that bring to mind classic Kevin Smith, but this is a surprisingly bland little rom-com that has little of the pointedness and relevance that many of Smith's other entries have. Fans of the film will probably be more than happy with this Blu-ray's audio and video presentation, and the two commentaries are enjoyable. But there are both better Smith films out there as well as better rom-coms.
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