Turkey, 2002
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Score: **

The opening scene of DISTANT (UZAK) shows Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak), distant from the camera standing in a field of snow.  He walks closer to the road and hitches a ride to the city.  Like this segment, Ceylan’s new film “Distant” is somber in mood, like his other early entries.  Again, his story concerns a filmmaker, this time called Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir), played by the same actor who starred in Ceylan’s CLOUDS OF MAY. 

The simple plot concerns commercial photographer and some-time filmmaker Mahmut who suddenly finds his space invaded by an unannounced visiting distant relative, Yusuf. Yusuf seeks a place to crash while hunting down a job on a ship in order to travel the world.  The two struggle to connect – with difficulty.

Little sound is heard in the soundtrack, maybe just footsteps or the faint dog’s barking and music is virtually absent.  The atmosphere is always solemn.  Even the scene when Mahmut discovers Yusuf’s dirty shoes could have been done with humor, but Ceylan prolongs the spraying of the shoe to quell any initial quirky moment that might exist.

This is not to say that Celyon’s film is dull or boring.  He fills his scenes with some stunning photography from the snow-covered streets during a winter in Istanbul to the fields of snow.  He takes an uncompromising look at the relationship of the two main characters while never infusing any artificial drama or cheap theatrics.  Irritations like turning on the light to get a magazine or using the telephone are real life nuances.  Some genuinely intriguing discussions like the debate on filmmaking are thrown in, but in truth, the viewer has to sit back and observe Ceylon’s musings and figure out his intentions.

In CLOUDS OF MAY (the only other Ceylon film I have seen), the protagonist filmmaker was criticized by his family for making non-commercial films.  DISTANT is again non-commercial, but it has won numerous awards like the Cannes Grand Prix Award.  DISTANT has not had major commercial distribution but it is making its rounds in the art houses around the world.

Review by Gilbert Seah.

Yes, SCOOBY DOO 2: MONSTERS UNLEASHED is better than the original, but that’s like saying leukemia is better than cancer. It’s still wretched, painful viewing.

The whole Mystery Inc. gang is back – Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.) Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Velma (Linda Cardelini), Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and Scooby (pure CGI). At the film’s open, they’re attending a grand opening of a Coolsville Museum exhibit of monster costumes of villains they’ve unmasked. Then a bad guy steals the costumes and makes real monsters out of them. Then the real monsters attack the city. Then the Mysteries Inc. gang stops them. Then American Idol winner Ruben Studdard shows up to sing an Earth, Wind & Fire song while the cast does an embarrassing choreographed career-killing dance.

Oh, you can add Seth Green as a museum curator, Alicia Silverstone as a nosy reporter and Peter Boyle as a senile old man, but you’re not fooling me – this is the same movie. Granted, there are two big fart gags rather than just one this time around, but still, it’s the same crap all over again – zero story, zero laughs and all special effects.

The only thing that makes this marginally cooler – and you should read “marginally” as if it were bold, underlined and in red – is that the monsters are the same from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, so there’s a slight kick of nostalgia. It wears off pretty quickly, though. This one gave me a migraine.

Review by Rod Lott.

USA, 2004
Director: Kevin Smith
Cast: Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Lopez, Raquel Castro

Kevin Smith’s first non-Askewniverse outing had me worried. While I have always liked—okay, loved—his output, the trailer for Jersey Girl kind of made me cringe. “What the hell is this?” I asked myself as I was waiting for My Boss’s Daughter to start. Then I remembered I was in My Boss’s Daughter and that I had no room to say anything.

But combine the atrocious trailer with the fact it has been completed, I believe for over a year but sat on the shelf to distance itself from the then recent Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez abortion Gigli, I went into this with extraordinarily—and I mean extraordinarily—low hopes.

So how is it?

Well, first off, Kevin Smith’s usual brand of fans—the ignorant teenage stoner—will hate this movie. It will ruin their “buzz.” They will lament the death of their hero to maturity and cry over the fact that Jason Mewes is nowhere in sight. So let’s just go ahead get them out of the way immediately.

Secondly, the cynical hipsters who love Smith’s trademarked brand of pop-culture aloofness and sarcasm will also leave the cineplex with a scowl on their face, running to their Livejournals to post how “Kevin Smith has sold out.” They will then listen to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs album they downloaded and act ironic while stylistically mussing their hair.

But I, on the other hand, loved it. Call it saccharine, call it overly-sentimental, call it pure pablum—but I’ll call it one of the best movies of the year. And I’m not just saying this out of Kevin Smith fan boy glee—I’m saying this because this is a real film for Kevin Smith, showing that he’s so much more than the public gives him credit for. It is touching, it is extremely well-written and it’s also funny in a way you wouldn’t expect.

It’s 1994, and the much-maligned Ben Affleck (who honestly, I have no beef with) is the unfortunately named Oliver Trinke, an up-and-coming music PR-man who has just fallen in love with the horribly-coiffed Gertie (Jennifer Lopez). The two, in a brief opening montage, fall in love, get married and have a child. But the bliss is cut short when Gertie dies in child-birth, leaving Oliver alone with their new baby girl.

Distraught over her death, Oliver retreats into his work, leaving the baby with his working-class blue-collar dad (a sublime George Carlin). Tired of Oliver’s ignoring of the baby, dad forces him to take the baby on the day of his career making PR-stunt (representing some ‘80’s rapper who has “no future in movies”)—who happens to be Will Smith (this is a few months before ID-4 is released). The baby’s crying forces Oliver to tell off the crowd of ***censored*** entertainment reporters, calling them “parasites” (or something to that effect). Ultimately, he’s fired and made the laughing stock of the PR-world. Forced to move back home with dad, he, in a very moving scene, promises to devote his life to raising his daughter, now named Gertie after her mother.

Seven years later. Oliver is working alongside his dad for the Highlands, New Jersey sanitation/road-crew, raising his daughter and well… that’s about it. After a chance encounter renting porn at the local video store, Oliver meets clerk Maya (Liv Tyler), piquing his interest in women once again. But, more importantly, after selling the town on his road-blocking/street-repair plan, he also starts craving his old life in New York, shilling for rock stars and spin doctoring celebrities. Of course this doesn’t go over well with Gertie, who likes her life the way it is. This leads to an argument between them that is one of the most heart-wrenching, tear-inducing things I have ever seen.

I know what you’re saying so far: “Um, hey Louis… I’m a 15-year-old-loser. This movie doesn’t sound very funny. Even Chasing Amy had dick and fart jokes in it, and that was like, a drama and stuff? Where’s the dick and fart jokes in Jersey Girl? And hey, know where I can score some smoke, bro?”

No, 15-year-old-loser… I don’t know where you can “score some smoke.”

And no, Jersey Girl isn’t laden with dick and fart jokes. But it’s the situations, and as per usual with Kevin Smith, dialogue that makes the admittedly-profanity laden humor work. But the out-right “HA-HA” humor is few and far between in this film—it’s supposed to be. The film is much deeper than what people would expect it to be. Face it people, for the most part, it’s a drama.

But it’s a ***censored*** good one.

Ben Affleck, whom I know 97% of you out there hate him (for reasons unbeknownst to me—he was Daredevil!), but he does a really solid job here, as does Liv Tyler. Usually, something about her rubs me the wrong way, but I found myself falling in love with her as I watched this. But the two break-out roles belong to a subdued, emotive George Carlin, and newcomer Raquel Castro.

I have to make special note of Castro—she’s the most talented young actress I’ve seen since those Spy Kids (okay, bad example). But, as the title character, she’s way beyond her years and practically out-shines everyone in the film. I didn’t expect such a bravura performance from someone so young. She emotionally carries the movie and you feel everything she does—when she cries, you cry, when she’s happy, you’re happy. And on top of that, she’s very natural. No over-the-top “ain’t I cute” dramatics like that cynical, creepy little ***censored*** Dakota Fanning. (It will be interesting to see where Castro goes from here. Hopefully she’ll beat out the aforementioned Fanning for the best child roles Hollywood has to offer. But I doubt it—Fanning’s a little blonde white princess and Castro is Hispanic. No way would Hollywood let a Hispanic replace their new Jon Benet.)

Look, I know most of you are probably going to skip this. I’m not going to kid myself. I have heard far too many of you voice your opinion on the subject—forget that fact you haven’t even seen the God-damned thing yet. I know that the treacle-infused trailer has made you retch. I know the subject matter isn’t jaded enough for you ironic hipsters to sit back and make quiet, self-serving laughs at Star Wars in-jokes. I know that anything even remotely emotional will destroy that uber-cool façade you’ve spent the better part of a decade trying to build.

But for the rest of you out there who still have your heart and soul intact, trust me—you’ll fall in love with this Jersey Girl.

Review by Louis Fowler.

It was bound to happen...indie film darling Kevin Smith had to make a movie for the more mainstream tastes...unfortunately, JERSEY GIRL requires the viewer to take a shot of insulin before the credits begin to roll.

Set in 1994, a high-powered publicist entrenched in the heart of New York City’s glamor scene named Ollie Trinke (Ben Affleck) is obsessed with his work; when he meets Gertie (Jennifer Lopez), he forgets about his hectic life for a brief moment, but only long enough to fall in love and conceive a child. Gertie dies in childbirth, and the sudden shock of being a widower father with a career at full bore becomes too much for him. When he lashes out at the rabid media at a Hard Rock Cafe promotion for one of his “second rate, unknown” clients, his reputation in the industry is ruined and he is forced to move in with his father in a small town in New Jersey, where he works for the town’s road crew and raises his daughter. Naturally, in the process of being estranged from both his career and his wife, Ollie shifts his focus to his daughter, and together they forge an unbreakable bond—that is, until he gets a chance interview with a top publicity firm and begins making plans to move them back to New York.

The only real acting interest in the movie is 7-year-old Raquel Castro, whose ability is far beyond her young age, and does look enough like Jennifer Lopez to make their mother-daughter resemblance believable. She interacts with the veteran actors like she’s been in movies for years...which is trouble for Affleck, since he spends half the movie trying to eke out a tear whilst pondering the loss of his beloved wife; suffice it to say that REINDEER GAMES was the apex of his ability to emote. George Carlin, as Ollie’s down-to-earth dad, gets a few snickers, but is a dry shell of the curmudgeon we know is lurking inside him. Liv Tyler as Affleck’s grad student love interest is, well, Liv Tyler...despite all of the LORD OF THE RINGS hype, her presence is really best left to implied lesbianism in old Aerosmith videos.

The funniest part of the movie comes in the form of—shockingly—a short dialogue between Affleck’s character and Will Smith near the end, which should tell you something. The choice of “Sweeney Todd” as the subject of Gertie’s child-parent school performance is just so random it’s funny, but the rest of the jokes are flat, borrowing from every cutesy kid-and-parent movie you’ve seen before. A string of kids spouting off things about their parents, like hearing them have sex, elicits more eye rolling than guffaw, a comedy device far better encapsulated in the “boys have a penis, girls have a vagina” line from KINDERGARTEN COP. But for a movie brewed out of such a formulaic grab-bag, it’s understandable. This is a movie intended to draw out those “awwws...” from the audience, not to entice them to clutch their chests in coronaries of laughter.

Like it or not, most people will see JERSEY GIRL hoping for a Jay and Silent Bob cameo, a Joey Lauren Adams nip shot or perhaps even a quick pan across Alanis Morissette’s massive forehead, but the closest they’ll get are a few frames of Jason Lee and Matt Damon playing a couple of slimy publicists. Of course, looking for such flashes of classic Smith is fruitless, since the subject of JERSEY GIRL is a far cry from pothead philsophy, movie geek references or long-winded ruminations on Superman’s sexual prowess. While it’s definitely intended to be a departure from his previous films, JERSEY GIRL ends up as nothing more than pabulum for the soft-hearted date crowd and Garfunkel-esque parents who aren’t usually the main audience that attends Smith’s movies to begin with. You can’t blame him for wanting to make something beyond his trademark “Snootchie bootchie!” fare...it’s just too bad he settled on feel-good sap du jour.

Review by Burke Hamblin.

2001, Japan
Director: Shinobu Yaguchi
Starring: Satoshi Tsumabuki, Hiroshi Tamaki, Naoto Takenaka

Plot: With only one active member, Suzuki (Tsumabuki) realizes the swimming team of Tadano High School is not going to survive. When he has given up hope, the surprise arrival of a new female coach changes everything. She gathers a lot of attention, being a young and attractive female at the boy’s school and now everyone wants to join the team. But what they didn’t know is that she is a synchronized swimming instructor. When she proposes to form a synchronized swimming team, only Suzuki and 4 other misfits will stay in the team and decide to organize a special show at the high school cultural festival.

After I viewed the film, I learned that Waterboys was loosely based on a true event. ***censored***. What they did is take a simple inspiring story and turned it into a completely non-serious movie. And it truly worked. This is what we call a great comedy. I haven’t laughed so hard watching a movie since Revenge Of The Nerds. The quality of the film along with the actors’ great performances make this a truly fun ride all the way to the end.