Chasing Amy

Bomb Rating: 

(Director Kevin) Smith reverts to his signature brand of pre-Philistine humor, filling the film with more multi-tempoed profanity than a Tourette Syndrome convention.

There's widespread consensus amongst power-belching, monster-truck-driving males that all lesbians need to transform them from muff divers into sausage hiders is a man with a good-sized schlong. If "Clerks" weren't enough to convince everyone that director Kevin Smith is, at heart, little more than a foul-mouthed strip-club comedian in alternative filmmakers' clothing, he's now turned the schlong theory into a two-hour movie in which a comic book artist, Holden (Ben Affleck), falls in love with another comic book artist, Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), who happens to be a lesbian.

In the film the schlong theory is euphemized as "deep dicking," a term Holden and his best friend Banky (Jason Lee) use with a mixture of sincerity and irony so that Smith can defend himself at festivals by insisting he's not a pig. There's also another bit of disturbing subtext involving a comic book artist named Hooper (Dwight Ewell), a gay, black man who masquerades as a straight militant black man in order to sell his comic book. What better way to acknowledge your lack of intelligence and historical understanding than to brush off the message of Malcolm X by portraying its adherents as closet fags?

When not attempting to exorcise his own personal demons, Smith reverts to his signature brand of pre-Philistine humor, filling the film with more multi-tempoed profanity than a Tourette Syndrome convention.

Having failed to come to grips with his on-screen id as it wanders through the film like a decapitated chicken, Smith resolves his odd love triangle in a fashion that's so ridiculous it will surely alienate his core audience of militia members and Norge repairmen. By that time, they shouldn't have too much trouble finding their way to the exits.

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