Good Morning Friends! I hope you are having a most excellent Friday. Some weeks back I had this idea for a new series on the blog where I share some item that is particularly special to me. Up until this point I have largely been talking about items in video games, but this morning we are going to diverge a bit from that format. I am also not nearly as faithful about doing one of these every Friday as I am with the Mixtape Mondays series, but ultimately that was the intent. Sometimes you create a series to give you options for when you are feeling like following that format and that is very much the case with this series.
Jersey Girl
Jersey Girl is effectively the Kevin Smith film that no one remembers, but I am here today to make a case for you giving it the time of day. This will not be an easy undertaking, especially given that it is actually hard to find on streaming services. You are forced to purchase it through Google or Apple or go through the nonsense that is adding Cinemax to your Hulu or Amazon subscription in order to access it. However, I am here today to tell you that this is quite possibly my favorite Kevin Smith film. I like many watched Clerks when I was a teenager and became a fan of his particular style of irreverent “dick and fart” humor. I think I matured with him as I followed his films through a sequence of Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy… each time I feel improving on what made a Kevin Smith film. Jersey Girl to me is the pinnacle of that maturation allowing the tackling of a serious film while still interjecting enough of that irreverent flavor to make it easy to consume.
Both Critics and Fans of Kevin Smith disagree with me however, given that the film has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 42%. Ultimately the film was a “failure” from a sheer monetary standpoint as it cost a reported $35 million to make and only took in an adjusted gross worldwide of just barely over that $35 million. I would say probably a large chunk of that money went to the cast, because it was rather wildly sprinkled with talent for the time. Here is a rundown of some of the major cast:
Ben Affleck – Ollie Trinke
Jennifer Lopez – Gertrude Steiney (very briefly)
Liv Tyler – Maya
George Carlin – Bart Trinke
Stephen Root – Greenie
Mike Starr – Block
Jason Biggs – Arthur Brickman
Will Smith – as Himself
So what went wrong? Why did this film perform as poorly as it did? Here is my line of thinking.
Problem 1: Bennifer and Gigli
One of the problems with bringing a film to market is that they have a very long lead time. Jersey Girl was originally targetted to a 2003 release date, which was ultimately pushed back to 2004 for reasons I will discuss shortly. That means that more than likely it started pre-production work in 2001 and filmed in 2002… and this was an era when the Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez celebrity coupling referred to as a “Bennifer” was a hot property. However, that changed rapidly after the release of the studio flop Gigli with an estimated budget of $54 million and a Gross Worldwide return of just over $7 million. Jersey Girl went through a few changes, namely the role of Jennifer Lopez was diminished in the advertising and it was pushed back to 2004 hoping that it would offer enough time for the bad press of Gigli to die down.
I think however more than anything the public just did not care to see Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in anything. I am not exactly the type of person that consumes media focused on celebrity gossip, but even then it was impossible to escape people talking about “Bennifer”. I think people just got sick of it, and what was a net positive in 2001 when planning and production likely began for Jersey Girl, was a toxic asset in 2004 when the movie was finally released. Being a follower of Kevin Smith, I knew about the film and was anxiously awaiting it… but I remember it was actually rather hard to get ahold of at the time of release. This is one of the films that was quietly released without much fanfare, and if my memory is correct was only actually in theaters locally for a few weeks. I remember missing it at the traditional theaters and ultimately having to catch it at one of the budget second-run theaters that were popular at the time.
Long story short… Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were not a couple anyone wanted to see at the time.
Problem 2: Clerks Fans
The other core problem the movie had was the fact that it was Kevin Smith’s film. With that came a certain understanding of the type of film the audience was expecting. Prior to Jersey Girl, you had Clerks in 1994, Mallrats in 1995, Chasing Amy in 1997, Dogma in 1999, and the exceptionally campy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in 2001. While Dogma and Chasing Amy were significantly better films than the rest, they all followed a fairly familiar formula of putting the “dick and fart” jokes upfront and then weaving a narrative around them.
Jersey Girl was a wild departure of Kevin trying to make a more serious film, with the main character losing both his wife and his career only a few minutes into the film and the core narrative focusing on the struggle of adapting to being a proper adult and the rigors of parenthood. In many ways, I think these were things that Kevin himself was struggling with, and as one of his audience being of a specific age… I was going through these changes along with him. However, there was still a core fandom that did not want any part of a serious Kevin Smith film. It is moments like this that a “cult following” can backfire and discussion of “selling out” starts being mentioned. His legion of fans… ultimately panned this film.
Why it is worth watching
There is nothing about Jersey Girl that is original, in fact, one of the key complaints that I hear levied against it by critics is that it is too formulaic. The thing is… formulaic movies exist in droves and not every film has to be groundbreaking. There is a sub-genre of romantic comedy that centers around an awful guy learning to love through interactions with a heart warming child they are forced to take care of. This worked for Liar Liar in 1997 and Big Daddy in 1999, and I think very much Jersey Girl was an attempt to apply the Kevin Smith style of character-driven comedy to that sort of a film. I think it does so beautifully but also does heavily stack up some tropes. I think it does so in a charming manner that creates an extremely watchable film.
What does it for me though is like all Kevin Smith films, it creates this universe of loveable characters that all interact together to make a plot. There are great performances by George Carlin as the grumpy grandfather with a heart and his two coworker friends in Stephen Root as Uncle Greenie and Mike Starr as Uncle Block. There is a side plot in the movie that Ben Affleck’s character nuked his career over raging about Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and not understanding why anyone was taking it seriously. This is an opinion that I legitimately remember being voiced about not understanding why the “Parent’s Just Don’t Understand” dude was a big deal. It beautifully bookends this concept with an appearance by Will Smith towards the end of the film talking about the only thing that really matters to him are his children.
If for no reason else the movie wins huge points for me for the horrified teacher played by Betty Aberlin of Mister Rogers Neighborhood fame. There is a side gag focused on how every child in young Gertie’s class is obsessed with Cats, and at a talent show EVERYONE is apparently singing Memories from Cats. Instead Gertie performs a talent show rendition of “God That’s Good” from Sweeny Todd embedded above. Firstly it is extremely well done, but the shocked teacher and confused audience are what really sell the scene for me. The film as a whole has all of the Kevin Smith oneliners, but they are just woven together in a narrative structure that is focused on something more meaningful than dick humor.
I personally feel like Jersey Girl deserves more attention than it has gotten over the years. I feel like a number of circumstances not related to the film itself have painted it In a certain light. If you ever have a chance to watch it with an open mind, then I highly suggest you do so. It is absolutely still a Kevin Smith film, but just one that takes a more serious path to get to its humor.
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Good Morning Friends! I thought I would take a bit to cover something that happens in the FFXIV community with its more populated servers. The first block of servers is a screenshot taken from around 7 pm CDT last night, showing that all seven servers were locked for new character creation. This would give someone the impression that they can’t create a character on the same server as their friends. However, the bottom block is from 7 am CDT this morning, and notice that all of the servers but one are back open if I had to guess if you had checked early enough that one also would have been open.
This is the frustration of playing Final Fantasy XIV since they don’t want “dead” servers to be a thing, they are extremely slow to add new ones. This means that if a player is trying to start the game during prime time hours, they are likely not going to be able to roll on the intended server. It is very important that as you sell your friends on this game, that you also warn them about this possibility. As always there is a nifty website that you can check to see if your target server is open for new character creation. However in my personal experience is that if you log in first thing in the morning, you should be able to create new characters without issue.
In other news, I managed to get my Dancer to level 80 on the 10th and have swapped over and started working on Ninja. I have been taking a fairly deliberate path through some of the classes I am working on, and largely it is due to the fact that I am trying to also come along behind the scenes and clean out my vault of gear I no longer need. I had leveled Bard quite some time ago and recently leveled Machinist which meant that in order to do a clean sweep of all “dex” gear I needed to then level Dancer and Ninja as well. This is an interesting class but I have to admit that the whole Ninjutsu thing is a little fiddly for my tastes. It reminds me a bit too much of the old days of memorizing fighting game movies, but I would imagine this is entirely purposeful. I know the button press combinations needed for the few really useful abilities and I am rolling with that.
At the close of the evening, I managed to get my Ninja up to 57. For the moment at least I am living in South Shroud and running Palace of the Dead over and over. It seems to be the best possible way to really push through the leveling up until 61 when Heaven on High opens up. I am of course doing my daily roulettes which help put on a few easy levels, but there is still a good deal of repetition in running “Palace” over and over again. The positive however is that it seems like a lot of people are leveling alts through this method right now, and I have had some pretty great conversations while running the randomized dungeons.
Once again I am constantly amazed at just how generally chill the community is. We had a few runs last night that went horribly wrong. There are just times through randomization that you get a bad streak of events, and there was one point where everyone but one player was laying dead on the ground and that single-player had to run to the shrine and resurrect us all. No one fell into a yelling fit and no one made a big deal about it… we just pushed forward and finished the ten floors thanking the remaining player for rezzing us. Were these other games, it is entirely likely that someone would have rage quit in the middle leaving us down a player. I had a phenomenally awful World of Darkness run the other day and we gave it five attempts on the first boss, trying to steer players towards the mechanics before someone finally quietly voted to abandon duty. There were no screaming, just constant friendly reminders of how the mechanics worked that were ignored.
Lastly, I thought I would give an update on the housing hunt. My fingers were in fact not fastest enough. I had been periodically poking the placard starting around 7 am my time. As I understand it when a house opens up it will actually be available anywhere between 30 minutes and 36 hours from when it is relinquished. So you are fighting this invisible timer that you have no clue when exactly you need to click. When I took this screenshot that I am reusing, there were only a handful of players trying for the house. By the time it actually went up for sale, there were around a dozen people. I went downstairs to use the restroom and by the time I got back upstairs it was sold to someone who had not even been there waiting with us when I last checked. I am hoping that when the lottery system goes into place, that I will be able to get a house in that manner. Once you have a house, any house it is apparently easier to relocate to another property because you are not beholden to the invisible timer. I still eventually want a small plot in The Mists, and if the world were perfect it would be lot 13, or the equivalent on the subdivision.
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Good Morning Friends! I come to you with a heavy heart because last night I realized that we veterans of Final Fantasy XIV have been doing a massive disservice to the sprouts. We have been preaching for so long to completely ignore all side quests and focus only on the Main Story Quest or MSQ, that we have likely been sabotaging attempts made by the Square team to ease the player base into group content. In Final Fantasy games there is a construct generically referred to as the Beginner’s Hall, and generally speaking, it is a room somewhere at the start of the game that has a bunch of NPCs you can talk to in order to get some fairly generic tips about playing the game. When this was put into Final Fantasy XIV as the Hall of the Novice, I completely ignored it because I was already deep in the game at that point and had no desire to talk to a bunch of random NPCs.
The game however really wants us to pay attention to this system, even placing the leader of the guild in all of the starting city Inns. However, when you first encounter this system, you can’t really use it because it requires the player to be level 15 in order to register for training. It has a unique icon that looks like a sprout, so in theory that I am guessing was supposed to indicate to new players that they should be talking to this person. I have been spending some time on an alt on the Primal data center, and yesterday was the very first time I actually engaged with this system. The thing is it is shockingly good and we should probably be telling our sprout friends to make sure they don’t miss it.
This is of enough significance that Square now sends the player there as part of the revised Main Story Quest. It doesn’t however go far enough. I think that realistically it should ask the player to complete all of the missions for their class role before progressing forward. The timing and location of this Hall of Novice is extremely specific, given that it is quite literally located around the corner from the first dungeon you will encounter Sastasha. On the main story quest, you have to go in and talk to the Smith, but you don’t actually have to register for any of the training. The thing is, I knew that you could earn a pretty nice set of gear from completing the training so I went through the process of registering and completing it for Tank.
I’ve played a significant number of different MMORPGs and encountered several systems designed to try and ease a player into group roles. However, I have never seen a system that actually gives you a very firm understanding of how these things work while also setting up short scenarios to test out those skills. For example, as a tank, it fully explained what Enmity is, and how one gains it and then proceeded to put me through a series of paces that were specifically tailored for the job that I was tanking on. It covered things like how to build threat on multiple targets, and which targets to focus on first. It also had an entire chapter on how to get out of things on the ground, and given that FFXIV works slightly differently than other games it is probably a solid idea that players go through this even if they are already used to other MMORPGs.
The training is all well and good, but the real reason why you should always complete the Hall of the Novice is that you are rewarded a set of actually nice-looking gear. Early tank gear specifically looks awful, and through running this series of missions you are awarded gear that is going to probably be your main glamour for about fifty levels. Similarly for the Healer and DPS roles you are given the Acolyte and Foestrikers set appearance, which is one of the more iconic looks in the game. More important than all of this however is you are given a ring that is going to greatly boost your experience gain on all jobs going forward up to level 30. Experience boost gear is always welcome and when combined with the expansion earrings, should serve to make leveling those alternate jobs go at least a little bit faster.
Maybe I am wrong and maybe I am the only person who had completely ignored this system. However I think given how much time we have spent trying to tell people to only focus on the MSQ, that there are probably a large number of sprouts that have never engaged with it. I would also say that if you are wanting to go into Final Fantasy XIV and start dabbling with roles you have maybe never done before, this is actually a very good way of teaching you the ropes. If I were to write out a guide on how to tank, a lot of the topics I would cover are things that the series of missions goes over. We would probably all be better players in general if we ran through the missions for each of the roles. Seeing as I am going to be leveling my healers soon, I am likely going to run through the Novice Hall quest series just to see how well it does on that role as well.
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Good Morning Friends! I thought I would start out this morning by talking a little bit about the information I posted over the weekend. For those who may not have read it yet, I wrote some of the various options that you have for leveling alternate jobs in Final Fantasy XIV. More specifically I focused on some of the options that I have actually been partaking of while leveling my own alternate battlecraft jobs. I’ve been more or less following the script and completing my beast tribe dailies, daily crystarium hunt logs, and a handful of the most beneficial roulettes. As a result, my Dancer is roughly one-quarter of the way through level 78 and pending everything going as planned should hit level 80 tonight.
Essentially I have been putting on at least two levels every single day and doing so in a pretty reasonable and chill manner. I’ve not really been grinding anything, with the exception of putting on a full third level yesterday doing Bozjan Southern front. If I keep this up I will actually be able to level everything to 80 well before the Endwalker expansion lands. I will likely vary things up significantly for tanking and healing classes because I can very easily do the whole highest dungeon queue method for those. Another side benefit of all of this process however is that I am getting extremely close to having maxed out all of the battlecraft beast tribes, which is a thing I never thought would actually happen. I am more and more convinced that this sort of method, is what the FFXIV team had intended for leveling alts.
More recently I have had plenty of allowances left over to devote some effort to my gathering jobs. So I am spending an awful lot of time in the Namazu camp because Mining, Botany, and Fishing are all within that level range. It seems like another very easy way to cram on a free level every single day. Once I have finished with the battle jobs, I will probably start abusing these alternate leveling systems in order to push up my crafting professions as well. Final Fantasy XIV seems to really reward doing a little bit of a lot of different things every single day, and maybe just maybe I am mature enough to be able to do repeated tasks day after day until I reach a goal. I’ve always struggled with daily quests because I get bored and wander off before I actually reach whatever goal I am seeking.
I’ve talked at length about how awful of an idea it is to start a second character in Final Fantasy XIV. There however is a single exception to this rule, and that is that you want a character located on another data center. As a result, I actually have a handful of alts that I have created sprinkled out through a few different worlds. More recently I have been spending a bit of time on my alternate character on Ultros in the Primal datacenter. When I last left this character I had gotten it to level 20 and was ready for the Marauder quest. On the Main Story Quest side, I was just about to hop on the airship to head to Gridania from Limsa Lominsa and start the world tour that ends in the first handful of dungeons. I think essentially if I reach a point where I can no longer make easy progress on the job that I am actively leveling… I might start hopping over to some of these alts and throw on a few quests as a chill nightcap for the day. I’ve also not seen any of the ARR content since 2013, so it might be fun to see exactly how that early game worked.
Lastly I am in the market for real estate. One of the other side benefits of this whole “do a lot of things every day” aspect of the game is that the money just sort of materializes from out of nowhere. When I came back to the game two months ago, I was sitting on 100,000 Gil to my name. This morning I am staring at just shy of 5,000,000 Gil. I’ve not really done anything out of the ordinary other than selling pretty much anything that has any modicum of value on the market board and doing a wide variety of activities. I have very specific requirements when it comes to housing, namely that I want a Small House in the Mists neighborhood. This means that I am logging in every morning and checking the housing district for Limsa Lominsa and today I happened to see an opening.
The only problem is… we already have a large number of people camped out at the sign post. It is highly unlikely that I win this battle because I don’t plan on macroing my way to victory. However I am still going to periodically try and purchase the house because apparently there is a hidden timer that starts ticking down when a house goes on the market. There is no actual way to know when you can purchase the house, so you just have to sit here and keep trying. Maybe I will be lucky, but I sincerely doubt I manage to purchase this very first house. I think mostly I want a home because I want to feel even more invested in this server community. I love Cactuar and always have and I want to forever be part of the strange group of loveable weirdos that call it home.
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