Mostly fascinating and humorous meander through the recent romantic comedy with bite territory. This film overcomes an unpromising scenario (2 overgrown schoolboys writing comic books for a living - deeply meaningful stuff) and some acting limitations (Affleck's rather wooden performance and Adams' annoying shriekings), to draw you in and release you at its end to the wide world with a few fresh perspectives on life, love and gender. This has to be down to the creativity of its young director, the amazing almost unbelievably good dialogue and some truly memorable characters (Lee (especially), Ewell, Mewes and Kevin Smith himself).
So smart, sassy and sexy is this film that it's like a new window on a hardly familiar world. Time and again, the dialogues are so cool, fast and funny I'm left amazed. How could anybody (let alone everybody in the movie) have a quick enough brain to talk hip-perfect all the time? I guess that could be the reason their speech is peppered with profanity - using it so liberally gives their brains a fraction more time to think of the exactly correct jargon for what they want to say.
This film makes me feel old (30s). What a difference a few decades make! What would the likes of Bogart, Wayne or Eastwood have made of a young woman like Alyssa, smart talking, foul-mouthed, sexually ambivalent and voracious? Would she have stirred their unshakeable masculinity? How would they have handled her? A lot differently from Affleck, I feel sure. (Maybe there's an idea for a new comedy there)
One minor quibble - like so many 90s films this one shows virtually all the characters smoking throughout. Why is that necessary? It's not realistic (smoking rates are like 25% rather than 90%), and its more likely to harm health than any amount of sexual experimentation. Overall, though, a good thought-provoking film.
So smart, sassy and sexy is this film that it's like a new window on a hardly familiar world. Time and again, the dialogues are so cool, fast and funny I'm left amazed. How could anybody (let alone everybody in the movie) have a quick enough brain to talk hip-perfect all the time? I guess that could be the reason their speech is peppered with profanity - using it so liberally gives their brains a fraction more time to think of the exactly correct jargon for what they want to say.
This film makes me feel old (30s). What a difference a few decades make! What would the likes of Bogart, Wayne or Eastwood have made of a young woman like Alyssa, smart talking, foul-mouthed, sexually ambivalent and voracious? Would she have stirred their unshakeable masculinity? How would they have handled her? A lot differently from Affleck, I feel sure. (Maybe there's an idea for a new comedy there)
One minor quibble - like so many 90s films this one shows virtually all the characters smoking throughout. Why is that necessary? It's not realistic (smoking rates are like 25% rather than 90%), and its more likely to harm health than any amount of sexual experimentation. Overall, though, a good thought-provoking film.