This morning on Howard Stern, he was about to play a tape of J. Lo and Ben Af-flack talking about the King of All Media. The catch was this: director Kevin Smith had to be on the phone to set it up. OK, the producers bit, and the Jersey director was allowed on air to set up this clip of two superstars discussing the DJ.

Smith got on and complained that he couldn't get on in the past. Anyway, the tape played...
It turned out to be dialogue from Smith's next film.

That wouldn't be so bad...

BUT!

Well...

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Af-flack are so popular b/c they are so good. They have a natural way about them that makes them stars. Like most movie stars they play variations on themselves. As many classes of Misner will teach you, acting is just the exercise of putting yourself in different situations.

This clip was so bad that you'd think it was from a student film using the director's parents' friend's cousin's dog walker's next-door neighbors. With only two lines of dialogue he stripped away years of acting lessons and on-camera experience. With only four lines, he was able to make top-line, A-list movie stars sound like community theater actors doing "Grease" in a converted barn.

Is there no way to deliver his lines? His gig is that he writes realistic, natural dialogue, but his actors always seem uncomfortable getting their mouths around his run-on sentences and $10 words. The only time someone would use half those words is when they were studying for their SATs. Nobody talks like that.

How can a man make 5 movies and direct the biggest names in Hollywood and make their performances more wooden than my coffee table? He made Jennifer Lopez into Rebecca Pidgeon.

I'm a Jersey boy. I love Southern Jersey. I look forward to Kevin Smith's movies. I want them to be good and do well. But his films get stupider and flatter as time goes on. His only talent is that he got the first film off the ground. Bless him for that... but what the fuck?

How can he make the hottest couple of the year as boring as Fox's midseason lineup?

Their acting is slower than the new DA from "Law & Order" on 33 rpm.