When you dutifully report to a preview screening of a Ben Affleck/Jennifer
Lopez film (please don't stop reading), you don't expect to see a bizarre
confirmation that Stephen Sondheim has become as American as Hollywood,
but there you are.

If you're allergic to J.Lo (I am not, and even considered - perhaps alone
- "Gigli" as not quite the disaster as others made it out to be), don't
worry.  In "Jersey Girl," which will open mid-March, she has a footnote
of a role.  She meets high-powered Manhattan publicist Affleck, marries
him, gives birth, and dies - all in about 10 minutes.

The girl of the title is a terrific child actress, Raquel Castro, who
plays widowed-parent Affleck's daughter at age 7.  Kevin Smith, who has
done much better with "Clerks" and "Dogma," wrote a sentimental, hokey
script for "Jersey Girl," directed it well enough, but the musical
references in the movie are priceless.

His daughter keeps asking to see "Cats," but the Affleck character uses
only proper expletives about it, and somehow, they end up at "Sweeney
Todd," the excerpt shown in the movie being "God, That's Good!" as Todd
is disposing bodies, and the pie shop customers exclaim the quality of
Mrs.  Lovett's creations.

Gertie, the little girl, is impressed, and she decides to stage that
part for her parochial elementary school's family talent show.  The
movie's climax is about Affleck giving up his chance to return to the
flack business, in order to participate in the school show.  (I told you
it was a dumb flick.) He is Todd, the seven-year-old is a pretty good
Mrs.  Lovett, and George Carlin is the customer in the barber chair.

Before that finale, however, as Affleck is trying to get back from
Manhattan to New Jersey, there are *three* introductions to mother-daughter
teams presenting "Memory" (no music excerpts, thank goodness), and then
the unctuous, prim school principal's introduction: "They will perform
a song that I can only presume is a hymn: `God, That's Good!'."

For that scene alone, you could put up with both J.Lo and B.Aff.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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