Far and away Kevin Smith’s best film, and not coin­ci­den­tally his most heart­felt. I think Smith’s achieve­ment is to tell a uni­ver­sal guy’s story while still fea­tur­ing sig­nif­i­cant and sym­pa­thetic female char­ac­ters. Yes, Chas­ing Amy is spec­tac­u­larly pro­fane and the char­ac­ters are prone to giv­ing extended on-the-nose speeches per­fectly expli­cat­ing their inner moti­va­tions, but the cen­tral theme is wor­thy and true: love can be a mix­ture of ele­vat­ing another to a height to which you can’t mea­sure up, while para­dox­i­cally need­ing to have them do the same to you. More lit­er­ally, Holden (Ben Affleck) feels both fas­ci­nated and threat­ened by what he per­ceives as Alyssa’s (Joey Lau­ren Adams) more adven­tur­ous and worldly sex­u­al­ity, but also needs to believe that he has power over her and has some­how tamed her.

Out of Smith’s oeu­vre, the clos­est to Chas­ing Amy is Jer­sey Girl. But his per­sonal med­i­ta­tions on father­hood required more of his trade­mark raunch to off­set the trea­cle than the PG-13 allowed. It did, how­ever, fea­ture the sin­gle cru­elest joke I’ve ever heard: Andrew Lloyd Web­ber is “the second-worst thing that’s ever hap­pened to New York City.” Zing! Nobody, not even Lloyd Web­ber, deserves that!

Not one to pass up an oppor­tu­nity to cite Jaws

A far bet­ter writer than I has already been here and done that: please refer to Matthew Dessem’s review on The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion. I dis­agree with his obvi­ous dis­like of the film, but every point he makes against it is fair.

Offi­cial movie site: www.viewaskew.com/chasingamy

Cri­te­rion DVD info: www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=75

Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion review: criterioncollection.blogspot.com/2007/09/75-chasing-amy.html

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.

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