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Chasing Amy

Threat advisory: Severe - Severe risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

Sex is easy. Love is hard.

Life-long best friends, Holden McNeill (Ben Affleck) and Banky Edwards (Jason Lee) are enjoying success as the creators of the cult hit comic book Bluntman and Chronic. When they meet fellow comic book artist Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams), Holden's desire for the beautiful charmer is immediate. Alyssa, however, has set her romantic sights elsewhere and yet decides to pursue a friendship with Holden. This presents him with a dilemma: feeling the way he does, can he merely be friends with this woman?

Banky, who knows Holden best, doesn't think so.

As the friendship deepens, so do Holden's affections for Alyssa. And cautiously, yet effortlessly, so do Alyssa's for him. With their friendship struggling to define itself, Banky grows more and more frustrated at the notion of losing his best friend to emotional adulthood.

The third instalment in Kevin Smith's New Jersey trilogy which began with the Sundance and Cannes award winning comedy Clerks followed by Mallrats.

Intelligence analyst

Special Agent Matti

Theatrical report

Reality Clerks.

I just love young folks. Even more, I just love the American habit of neologising (like "You looked wierded out back there"). Even more I just loves slang (my niece says "Cake" whereas I would say "It's a piece of"). And I love movies where people bloody talk like they bloody do in real bloody life, and where people have sex and do drugs and they are all psycho, even the nice ones.

Moving right along, Chasing Amy is a giant leap for Kevin-kind, taking all the good bits from Clerks and making them even better. The dialogue makes Pulp fiction seem as old and jaded as it is (but no-one noticed because they were used to the geriatric scriptwriters of Hollywood, so it all seemed fresh and new). the performances bite with their reality. the plot is both uncomfortable and exciting. Wit and humour fall out of the sky like rain in Melbourne. There's more sex than Mardi Gras.

Now, it's a very broadminded film, and to get the most out of it you have to really let go and use the force. It pokes fingers into places that aren't normally poked (and that's half the fun). It's a tad politically incorrect on the all a dyke needs is a good rooting front, but I managed to get over that, so you probably will too.

This is a really, really, really good film, even if you've already seen it in a cinema.