The production notes for Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith's widowed-father-raises-spunky-moppet film, come with a warm and fuzzy director's statement in which Kevin Smith, the creator of Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma, baldly states that this paean to fatherhood and family ties is his most personal film.
"It's not only spun from a six-year love affair with my wife and child, but also the 33-year-long love affair I was lucky to share with my own recently deceased Dad," he declares.
Had one iota of the feeling expressed in Smith's statement made its way to the screen in his new movie, Jersey Girl, it might have signaled his transition from a smart-aleck chronicler of trash-talking suburban slackers and idle mall rats to something more substantial. But sadly, Smith has made a movie so false and blatantly icky that it's the film equivalent of making goo-goo noises and chucking a baby under the chin for 103 minutes. At the end, all you're left with is drool and a mountain of baby powder.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
The cautionary lesson of Jersey Girl, which might be that when it comes to screenwriting, facetiousness is a lot easier to convey than deep personal feeling. The movie, crammed with wince-inducing contrivances, false notes and fizzled jokes, all leading to a tired race-against-time ending, is so bad that it could stand as a textbook example of what not to do if you're an independent filmmaker flirting with the Hollywood mainstream.
At the center of the movie stands Ben Affleck, whose talent has curdled as his tabloid notoriety has spread. Portraying Ollie Trinke, a high-powered Manhattan-based music publicist who meets and loses his true love, Affleck is tolerable as a selfish, arrogant handmaiden to the stars. It's when he's required to change into a simpler, nicer guy that Affleck gets into trouble, straining in vain to twist what has become a natural sneer into a semblance of a smile.
Poor Affleck is also required to deliver what may be the longest, most overwrought harangue visited on a helpless infant since Ginger Rogers bombarded her baby boy with World War II propaganda in Tender Comrade.
Ollie marries the strong-willed Gertrude Steiney (Jennifer Lopez), but she dies in childbirth less than 15 minutes into the movie. The death leaves Ollie (and Affleck) rudderless. Shouldered with the responsibility of bringing up his infant daughter, Gertie (Raquel Castro), he leaves her day-to-day care to his hard-working blue-collar dad, Bart (George Carlin), in Highlands, New Jersey.
Eventually Bart rebels. And in what should have be an appallingly funny moment worthy of an Albert Brooks crash-and-burn scene, Ollie carts the baby to a news conference during which the combined stresses of a diaper crisis and work precipitate a public meltdown in which he bad-mouths the about-to-be superstar Will Smith.
The gaffe leaves him not just unemployed but also blackballed from the publicity business.
Leaping seven years ahead, Ollie is living with his father and daughter in Highlands and working at a dead-end job while dreaming of a comeback. But when an opportunity finally presents itself, he must choose between going to a job interview or attending a grade school pageant, in which Gertie and friends are doing a throat-slitting scene from Sweeney Todd. (Don't ask why.)
The movie also throws in a half-baked love story in which Ollie's friendship with Maya (Liv Tyler), a pliable video-store clerk who proffers her sexual services, flowers into love. Tyler, whose monotone matches a face that's the equivalent of pasteurized milk, has never been blander. Instead of a presence, she's an absence.
Completing the picture is Castro as the too-adorable daughter. In tune with the rest of the movie, Gertie is the kind of Everygirl who veers between saccharine and cute without bothering to stop at believable.
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
Among Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) villages, a certain rivalry exists between Arunothai, the largest of these villages, and Mae Salong, which is currently the most prosperous. Historically, the rivalry stems from a split in KMT military factions in the early 1960s, which divided command and opium territories after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cut off open support in 1961 due to international pressure (see part two, “The KMT opium lords of the Golden Triangle,” on May 20). But today this rivalry manifests as a different kind of split, with Arunothai leading a pro-China faction and Mae Salong staunchly aligned to Taiwan.
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