On the names of things: Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl
Posted on October 18, 2003 @ 10:19 am
The first official promotional image for Kevin Smith’s upcoming Jersey Girl hit the Web yesterday, and I have to say that it sets me a bit ill-at-ease. When Kevin first started talking up Jersey Girl a year or so back, he hyped it not as a wacky follow-up to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, but rather as a return to the somewhat more serious filmmaking of Chasing Amy–by far my favorite of his films. This promotional image, however, gives me a bad vibe. I’m not sure if it’s the girl’s missing teeth or the highlights in Ben Affleck’s hair, but something about the image screams “feel-good movie of the late winter/early spring” to me. That being said, I don’t know if I want to see the writer/director who brought me a film featuring a poop monster tell a story about a young girl, wise beyond her years, who teaches her father how to love again.
It isn’t just the “aww, how cute!” factor that makes me a bit apprehensive about Jersey Girl, though. As noted above, Kevin has touted the film as more serious in tone than light-hearted farces like Jay and Silent Bob and Mallrats. If he wants audiences to take his work seriously, however, why does he insist on giving his character completely ridiculous names? Let’s run through the leads in Jersey Girl, shall we? Ben Affleck stars as publicist Ollie Trinke, presumably borrowing his first name from Kevin’s beloved Green Arrow. Meanwhile, J.Lo plays his love interest, Gertrude Steiney. I guess her parents were big fans of “the lost generation” of twentieth-century American expatriates or something. The titular Jersey Girl? She’s named Gertie, after her her mom and Drew Barrymore in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Now, I realize that Kevin has a history of borrowing his characters’ names from both other films (Mallrats‘ Brody Bruce and T.S. Quint adapted from Jaws), as well as literary works (Chasing Amy’s Holden McNeill and Banky Edwards lifted from The Catcher in the Rye), but these names are just absurd! How can we take this film seriously, when most of the main characters are sporting the geek equivalent of pornstar names? Not only are the odds pretty darn slim that someone would be named either Ollie Trinke or Gertrude Steiney in the first place, but it’s downright preposterous to think that two people with such unlikely names would actually know each another, fall in love, and produce an effervescent little offspring. And, assuming they did, do you really think they would name her after her mother?
Posted by Jess | Filed Under Pop Culture |
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