Good Morning Friends! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. It is another Monday and as a result, it is time to bring you another Mix. For those who are new to the blog, this is a series I have been doing every Monday for the last couple of months, where I present a brand new Mixtape for your listening pleasure. As a kid, I made an awful lot of mixtapes because a good chunk of that time was in the “pre-cd hard to listen to a single track” era. The goal was to create something that was a “listen-through” or an album that I could just push play and ignore until I needed to flip it over. Granted a fair number of these tapes were designed as a way of sharing my own musical tastes with friends, but now I am sharing them with you, my readers.
Remember the Eclipse
This mix is one that I have been sitting on for a while because it has a problem, and I have not been able to remedy it. So in crafting these mixes, I have tried to apply a series of rules to them, one of them has been that no single album could have the same band twice. I have skirted this a few times by including side projects that include members of the bands already on the list, but I have attempted my best to stay true to this logic. Remember the Eclipse however has a glaring flaw in the inclusion of two different songs by The Bravery. I did not realize this flaw until I had already listened to the album several times and realized it had the ideal flow. I have been sitting on it ever since because I could not seem to figure out how to perform surgery on the playlist and strategically replace that one piece because in some ways it seemed like the ideal thing for the ideal location. So instead I am releasing this one as is, knowing that it violates my own tenets… and going to be okay with that. The name comes from a coffee house that used to exist… and for some reason popped into my head while creating this.
Track List
An Honest Mistake – The Bravery
Time to Pretend – MGMT
Believe – The Bravery
Maps – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Someday – The Strokes
Satellite – Guster
Feel It Still – Portugal, the Man
Crooked Teeth – Death Cab for Cutie
Back in Your Head – Tegan and Sara
11th Dimension – Julian Casablancas
The Way We Get By – Spoon
Tongue Tied – Grouplove
All These Things That I’ve Done – The Killers
Listen On Spotify
Listen on YouTube
There we have it friends, the sixteenth Mixtape in this series. It began with the song An Honest Mistake by The Bravery… and in the end, I guess that is fitting given that I committed my own honest mistake in creating the list. If you find yourself wanting to catch up on the other fifteen mixes in the series, check out the archive link below.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Thalen
Tonight we start the show with some discussion of copyright trolls trying to prove how broken our system is by copyrighting a Magic the Gathering deck. From there Grace talks about her experiences with the Kickstarter Kitfox game Boyfriend Dungeon. We revisit The Ascent as Bel, Grace, and Thalen have now played the game and relate their experiences of how it is not really Diablo but also really enjoyable. Ashgar and Kodra share their experiences of playing Bullet <3 in co-op and the challenges it presents. Bel talks a bit about the most recent controversy in FFXIV of people freaking out about Cruise Chaser not being a PVP mount and instead sold on the store. We talk a bit about Moonfire Faire and the bear friend mount. Finally, we wrap things up with a discussion of Katana Zero and Kodra’s experience playing it.
This one was one of the wild cards. This is the first one where the character design was done by someone else, as I was trying to find a character to fill a “mostly dragon, size large” role in the party.
Kori is another one who is not based on a previous RPG character of mine directly, but is very related to one. My sorcerer-turned-dragon (it’s a long story) from a previous D&D Campaign is her patron and also probably her dad. Neither of these is public knowledge in-setting.
The third member of the Order of the Silver Scale, Kori is the largest and most-imposing of the party members. She’s posing as a Dragonborn (she’s a dragon) and a Sorcerer (she’s a warlock, mostly). An extremely gifted ice mage, she mostly fights with things made from her own breath (daggers, etc) and a sword that seems to be made from non-melting ice. She’s also handy with improvised tools.
As for her personality, she has a good sense of humor; her dragon-like nature means that Tizak treats her with great respect. She is fond of straight-forward solutions to problems, and believes that dragons are better than everyone else.
It’s probably this belief that explains why she’s stuck walking around with an adventuring party. Her patron has sealed away her true form, and encouraged her to “learn more about the world”. Perhaps if she figures out that the “lesser races” aren’t, then she’ll be able to take to the sky with her real wings.
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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