OFF THE SHELF – Issue # 6: THE KEVIN SMITH COLLECTION
It seems only fitting that after last weeks “epic column”, that I throw a short one your way before we start getting to the point where there’s nothing but big, lengthy columns every week! Just to summarise what I’m trying to do here; I own a big DVD collection and I have it rather anally alaphabeterised and sub-sectioned within an inch of its life. Each week, I’m going to pull one of those sub-sections off the shelf (which would make a rather good title for a… oh wait, I’m already two steps ahead of myself!) and stick down a few words about why I like it, why I own it and why you should check it out. I’m also trying to put a personal edge to it as to what impact the film has or had or me generally! This week (and following on from the David Fincher piece) is all about the work of Kevin Smith.
Smith is pretty much the exact opposite to my other favourite directors that we’ve looked at so far (Spike Lee, Michael Mann, Coen Brothers, Farrelly Brothers and Oliver Stone pieces are to follow soon!) in that the visuals of his films are always secondary to the dialogue and the performance. Could you imagine Fincher favouring getting Jodie Foster’s line reading right in Panic Room over getting a complicated camera set up perfect? Smith is also one of the most ‘accessible’ writer/directors that the movie industry has ever encountered. Whether it’s through his own website or his production outfits website (www.viewaskew.com) or his comic book store (The Secret Stash, New Jersey) or the whole host of signed merchandise he offers or… most importantly and somewhat bizarrely… the well-attended, insanely huge Q+A sessions that he hosts around the world with his fans. Unlike the likes of Spielberg or Lucas, this is the sort of guy whereby if you thought one of his movies was shit, you could probably find a way to tell him to his face (as Smith himself found out unfortunately with Jersey Girl) with more ease then you’d ever thought possible.
Smith’s voice is an original one – capturing the fact that the high majority of us, when in social circles, talk popular culture and talk relationships and just… talk… in a relaxed manner that is completely unlike the dialogue movies seem to capture. With his Jay and Silent Bob characters he has found a safety net to his creative process that he is too often (sometimes even by me!) accused of falling bag on too readily and too regularly.
Smith’s confidence is growing (again) following the attack he suffered regarding Jersey Girl, as a result of his recent Clerks II critical acclaim. He’s started to expand the ‘voice’ he has and adapt his writing style (his next two projects are an original horror and a comedy outside of his Jersey setting!) and it’s my firm opinion that, within the next ten years and once a trailblazer has led the way in the field of comedy and broken down that specific Oscar barrier, Smith will be an Academy Award winning screenwriter. I genuinely believe that. He’s our generation’s Clint Eastwood. Not as an actor, but most definitely as a director. With his View Askew universe he’s in the rather fortunate position of being able to adopt Eastwood’s “one for them, one for me” attitude and could throw as many variations on Jay and Silent Bob join Police Academy or Jay and Silent Bob go Back to the Future as he likes as long as it gets him the opportunity to space them out between the projects his heart is really invested in. There was a time that I couldn’t see the advantage of having that luxury, as you’ll read about below, and rallied against him for jumping back into the “snootchies” and the “bootchies” every time the going got tough. I was wrong.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is my Kevin Smith DVD collection and why I like them:
Chasing AmyIs this Kevin Smith’s masterpiece? Is it his “Annie Hall” like the fat-lad with the soft voice said in the audience of one of Kev’s Q&A sessions (look at me, being all “Kev” about the guy. Never met him and asides from a deep, deep love for his work and a total inability to get tickets to his An Evening With… schtick I have absolutely no reason to be that “informal” about him. Although he did publicly destroy my “trusted Jaws 5” source so, you know, I guess you could say we were “buddies”. Ha Ha!) ? Let me tell you something, I’m sitting on the fence on those questions. I do think this is one of Kevin Smith’s strongest films. I do think not only is it one of the greatest indie movies ever made but also one of the best romantic comedies of that genre. But is it his masterpiece? Nah, he’s still got that to come. I really believe that. Every film he releases, there seems to be a stronger and stronger sense that he’s building his confidence as a writer and a director and I think there’s going to be something (yet to be released, maybe even conceived) that is going to just blow people away and force them to delve back into his back catalogue (and drive the profit margin over at viewaskew.com through the roof!) and re-appreciate his work. In terms of writing, for me, this is certainly one of the best films he has done in terms of out-and-out quotability and memorable lines. Hell, the homage to Jaws (my all-time favourite flick as you know!) whereby characters compare “sex injuries” is pure brilliance. The finale does smell of ‘third act desperation’ after several viewings [yet is still capable of pulling on your heartstrings all the same] and Joey Lauren Adams gets stuck in the Rosie Perez crossroad of being severely, severely under-rated as an actress but also suffering one of the world’s most annoying voices. Although, you’d fuck Joey Lauren Adams! This is the film that you show to people after you’ve said “Kevin Smith is one of the best and most original writer/director voices of our generation, working within the industry to date” and they reply with “What? The guy who did the shit monster in Dogma and the donkey-fucking in the sequel that he swore he’d never make? Fuck you!” Then when the end credits have rolled on this flick and your opponent is wiping ‘man tears’ from his eyes, you get the joy of extending your middle finger and offering a hearty “No… Fuck you!”
Clerks
I came to Clerks pretty late in the game I have to admit. And by admitting this, I’m revealing myself to be one of those Kevin Smith fans that caught on to him and his talents once he was more established (don’t you just hate those types?). I’d seen and dug the hell out of Mallrats, made a point of checking out his follow-up (the above detailed movie) but just always shrugged off Clerks as “the little black-and-white indie thing” that he did “to get noticed”. I just justified it the same way I dug the crap out of Steven Soderbergh’s flicks but never saw his “indie debut” (Jesus, why the hell am I admitting to not having seen something as beloved as Sex, Lies & Videotape on a movie website?) either! Then, one night I was in a bar with some friends and one of my mates had me in absolute fits of laughter when he was riffing on some other mate’s girlfriend (pulling out all sorts of zingers about her “sucking 36 dicks” – yes, you know where this is going!) Another friend then started reigning down on my ‘funny’ friend for stealing from Clerks. I said “What? The Kevin Smith flick?” He was like “Yeah – he’s just taken most of that word for word from that film!” I said “What? That film’s funny?” He was all like “Dude, you laughed your ass off at Mallrats right?” I agreed. “You dug Chasing Amy yeah?” he continued. I agreed once more. “Then what the fuck are you doing not having seen Clerks? Clerks is better than all of them!” I tried to justify it as not having had much time to getting round to it but he countered with the rather accurate observation that I’d been to see Michael Bay’s Armageddon four times that particular summer so I was full of shit. Which I was. One very quick, next-day, stop-over at HMV I sat down to watch Clerks and just had an absolute ball with the film. Totally loved it and felt guilty at the same time for calling myself a film fan but not having embraced this during its hyped-up initial release like I’d done with Rodriguez’s El Mariachi or Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Moral of the story? There is none, but you will learn two things from this mini-review: 1. Clerks is one of the best writer/director debuts in movie history, in my humble opinion and 2. The next week, in the pub with my mates? I was that hysterical, Kevin Smith quote-stealing motherfucker with a penchant for shouting “Snootch to the Bootch!” at the top of my voice come kicking-out-time, while everyone else rolled their eyes and said “My God, that guy’s like five years out of date!”
Clerks II
This is the film where I started to get a little angry with Mr Smith and his output. He’d said he was moving away from the View Askew universe, he said Clerks II would “never happen” and he said he was done with Jay and Silent Bob. I wanted to see him mature, I actually was going against the grain of the typical Smith-fan and openly stating that I wanted to see him do more movies like Jersey Girl (yeah, you read that right, and I stand by it! Fuck off!) and now, it just felt like all the accusations of Smith being nothing more than a merchandising-obsessed pimp, a one-trick pony etc. etc. were all true. I felt suckered. I wanted Smith’s take on a comic book movie, I wanted to see his Jason Lee version of Fletch, I wanted a… well, I just wanted more than a rehash of his first movie simply because his last film unjustly failed and now he wanted to “cop some dollar” back so he could remain Harvey Weinstein’s favourite, big-fat-cash-cow! This all may sound as if I’m being way harsh but this is genuinely how I felt and I need to get that set-up so you can understand how much egg I had on my chin when I finally saw the flick. “Finally” is very much an important word though. I was still being a stubborn son-of-a-bitch when the flick was released. Usually, for a Smith flick I’d be there on opening day (or in the case of Dogma, abandoning my family on Boxing Day to go and sit in a cinema on my own!) but I decided to make a stand against this one. My friends invited me to go with them. I refused. One friend said he would buy my ticket. I said it wasn’t about that. They went. I stayed home and watched Series 3 of my Magnum PI boxset. Then I got a text from a friend who was there seeing it. It read “Mate, it’s not actually that bad!” About twenty minutes later, I got another text “It’s actually pretty good!” I wrote back “How good can it be if you’re texting me whilst watching it?” The film finished, they went to the pub and called me up. “Seriously mate, it’s fucking funny as hell. It’s not what you think it is. You should definitely go and see it!” I said I was standing by my original opinion and that Smith was a sell-out and I wasn’t a fan anymore. Next day, I snuck off on my own and checked it out. I’ll go on record now – I was completely wrong about Smith and I was completely wrong about his sequel. I had an absolute blast with this film, loved it and went so far as to include it in my annual Top 20 flicks of the year, here on Filmrot. Smith had something heartfelt and touching that he wanted to say about that difficult period of coming out of your twenties and not knowing what to do with your life asides from keep a tight hold of your ‘popular culture’ comfort blanket, and he felt that revisiting Dante and Randall was the best way to do that. Out of the foundations of an alleged (by me) sell-out, sequel flick he delivered a genuinely hilarious, quite relatable piece on love, the importance of friendship… and bestiality.
Clerks: Animated & Uncensored
This is funny, funny stuff. I dig the hell out of it. I’ve got friends that won’t even entertain watching it as they think it “cheapens” the whole Clerks movie but they couldn’t be more wrong. Its six episodes of slick, surreal gag after slick – sometimes sick – surreal gag. The final episode in the ill-fated, mistreat series is an absolute pop culture joy in which everything from The Bad News Bears to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, by way of classic Loony Tunes cartoon shorts, are superbly hit upon. Actor, and master of answering machine etiquette, Alec Baldwin is a regular guest [voice] star and the original Clerks “crew” rejoin for what is six episodes of hysterical, outlandish fun. You should definitely add this to your collection if you’re a fan of Smith’s View Askew output and dig Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Mallrats more than his Chasing Amy and Jersey Girl stuff. It’s just hard to not to get taken aback by the feeling that the latest series’ of the hugely under-rated Family Guy has stolen a lot of it’s better, most recent gags from this “mini” show!
Dogma
This is the Kevin Smith film I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with. I know there’s people out there that are absolute, unwavering die-hard fans of this film more than any other that Smith has made (most of them are probably my drinking buddies truth be told!) but I have to really be in the right sort of mood to get a handle on it – I can literally go from thinking it is a hilarious, under-rated misfire to thinking that it is a relatively amusing but hugely overblown and uneven piece that goes on far too long (over two hours, but can feel longer!). I remember rushing out to see this on Boxing Day 1999, on my own because my mates were all like “The cinemas won’t be open over Christmas, man!” I ended up in the screening, completely and utterly on my own. I was ensnared within the first minute by the title card about the “platypus” and came out digging the film a great deal. Then I caught up with it on DVD and didn’t think it was all that great. I started disparaging the film and coming out with statements like “Over time, Dogma is going to date really badly and disappear but Jersey Girl will stand the test of time!” Let’s just say that I lost a lot of friends and took a lot of punches! Then, for the writing of this column, I went back and revisited this film – along with the others – and I just started to really get back into enjoying and embracing it again like I did the first time I saw it. The cast (Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Linda Fiorentino, Salma Hayek, Chris Rock, Alan Rickman, George Carlin and Jason Lee amongst others) is one of the best that Smith has ever had… well, at least until Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. What is very much apparent is that at its heart, it’s a brave, interesting and thought-provoking screenwriting piece that shows – even amongst the Jay and Silent Bob schtick and the poop monsters etc. – there’s a real talent to Smith. He takes a subject as diverse and controversial (as Smith would find out) as religion and makes an interesting and original movie about it. Something I often fail to see and take stock of when I watch it sometimes.
An Evening With Kevin Smith
This has no entitlement whatsoever to be as entertaining and as laugh-out-loud hilarious as it is. This is nothing more than three and a half hours, split over two discs, of Kevin Smith answering the questions of his fans and Jason Mewes turning up, being incoherent and then disappearing again. Yet it is absolutely hysterical. I genuinely mean that! It’s one of the best stand-up comedy “gigs” I’ve seen by someone who isn’t even a stand-up comic and has no aspirations to be. It takes a little while to get going as Smith throws out stock-self-deprecating-one-liners (“Why did I give myself the Marcel Marceau part? I can’t really act!”) but by the time Smith opens up on Affleck regarding the clash between shooting schedules on Daredevil and Jersey Girl, you start to realise that there’s a refreshing honesty and openness with Smith that cinema fans have never experienced before. By the time we get to Smith telling us about his encounter on Superman Reborn and his run-ins with Jon Peters and, most famously, Tim Burton this becomes an absolute must-see. The guy is completely and utterly engaging and captivating to listen to. There is no greater example of his masterful anecdote-spouting abilities and expert comedic skills then in his story on working with Prince. I seem to throw this disc on a hell of a lot and just scene skip to that particular moment whenever I’ve had a long, bad day and could do with a giggle!
An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder
I was really, really looking forward to this. As you’ll have gathered from the above comments, I dug the living daylights out of Smith’s first “An Evening With…” DVD release and couldn’t wait to see this one. I’d tried to get tickets to the London leg of the Q+A but failed (as I did again recently), only to see my friends secure two tickets and go without me (I never laughed at one of my friends as much as I did hearing him retell how he waited for… well in his own words: “I waited for fucking ages to get the microphone right? So I could get a question in for Kevin. I was going to ask this superb, shit-hot question about Star Wars Episode III just as an excuse to harangue him about why he loves the hell out of the shite that was Episode II and then this dipshit asks it before me and when it comes time to get my hands on the microphone I had to pass it away ‘cause I didn’t have a question right? So I said to this bloke trying to give me the mike ‘It doesn’t matter man, my question has already been asked!’ and he was all like ‘Well just ask another one!’ and I said ‘Fuck you dude, do you know how long it took me to think up that one?’ and then everyone starts trying to shush me up as if I’m a friggin’ heckler!”) This isn’t a patch on the first DVD (although it very nearly comes close with Smith’s superb attack on the 3am Girls here in the UK!) but there is still a shit load of very funny stuff from a guy that puts most stand-up comics to shame (anything where he attacks Affleck affectionately is very amusing!). There just appears to be a bit of a dampener put on the proceedings by the cynicism of Smith knowing that this is for a DVD follow-up to a hugely selling original and that there’s an already built in audience for this. As a result, sometimes he comes across as if he’s trying too hard, other times he takes his genius Ronnie Corbett style tangents off to new and even better heights (a ‘little person’ [dwarf to you or I] asks a question about curing writers block and Smith takes it off into an anecdote about getting high and watching Dora the Explorer, seemingly knowing that the little guy’s follow-up question is going to be about asking Smith to read his stuff, Smith just keeps taking his story off into new, hilarious directions before pulling the whole thing back round and crushing the little dude’s aspirations of getting some free celebrity proof reading!) Still better and funnier then watching another black comedian think he’s Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor on stage, but no where near as superb as the original! Hope he keeps pushing them out though!
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
Remember those fitfully amusing ‘side’ characters that Smith has running throughout Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma? Remember how you’ve always watched the likes of Chasing Amy and Dogma and thought ‘I wish they’d cut out all the emotional relationship stuff or the preachy religious babble and just get down to more ‘snoogins’ with the drug dealer and his fat buddy!’? Well this film is for you! An entire movie of Jay and Silent Bob! This should never, ever, in a million years, have worked or worked anywhere near as well as what it did. It has absolutely no right to be as funny as what it is. I still cannot get over how much I dig the hell out of this flick. I mean, it’s no classic or anything and it’s not going to win any awards but for a guaranteed good time and a cracking comedy experience this is an absolute peach of a film. The sort where, in a film with a cast including Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Rock, Jason Lee, Will Ferrell, Shannon Elizabeth, Mark Hamill, Jon Stewart, Judd Nelson, Ali Larter, Elisha Dushku, George Carlin, Jason Biggs, James Van Der Beek and Carrie Fisher… an ex-junkie non-actor takes the lead and steals the show (well… nearly! There’s no way Ferrell is letting anyone walk away with this film!). If you haven’t seen this film then it’s as close to a mainstream entry point for non-Kevin Smith disciples as you’re going to get.
Jersey Girl
I’ve got such a huge soft-spot for this film. I think it really shows Smith in a great light as a brilliant screenwriter with an original voice (although the fall-back onto the ‘race to get to a destination to tell a loved one that you care’ in the movie’s climax does betray that slightly – then again, when it’s a father racing to his daughter’s school play so he can star in a scene from Sweeney Todd with her and NOT some tanned, handsome vacuous leading man racing to the train station/airport/whatever to stop his gorgeous, sexy airhead of a leading lady from leaving there IS a small dash of originality there!) and Affleck shines brightly as a result of the script too. I couldn’t find a single cinema showing this when it was released. Like Christopher Guest’s movies, this just wasn’t given any slots around the cinemas in my area. I pretty much accepted that I was going to have to import the Region 1 DVD, until I found it showing at an art house cinema, two months after its release, for three nights only. I went along and saw it… and went back the third night, dragging some friends with me! This is a film that had the weight of the world working against it – Affleck and Lopez’s romance, the flop of their previous film together, Smith working outside of his comfort zone – and everyone treating it like it was an absolute affront to the movie industry. It was nothing more than a little well-acted piece about a successful big-city publicist who loses his wife, gains his daughter and finds himself unemployed and back living with his father in the blink of an eye. It’s a mature, heartfelt and amusing piece from Smith that shows he can work outside of Jay and Silent Bob lifting girl’s skirts up or slipping on banana peels. The worry – and Clerks II was a reflection of such a worry – is that his experience getting unjustly mauled with this film, will send him away from taking chances and making these sort of emotional, interesting films and back to making easy money on Jay and Silent Bob Go To Auschwitz or whatever! I do get the feeling when watching this film that Smith tore into his own film whilst in post-production and whilst the Bennifer thing was crippling the word-of-mouth on this film. I think the deleted scenes on the DVD betray that as well. I remember seeing production stills of the film prior to its release with Jason Mewes standing with George Carlin, both in sanitation uniforms, and the IMDB listing him as Affleck’s character’s old childhood friend. I remember reading that the first act with Ben and Jen was much, much longer and that the third act one with Liv Tyler was much shorter. If that’s the case and he’s managed to make a flick as nice, gentle and amusingly sweet as what he has out of it, then he deserves even more credit. I’d love to see what his original take with the material was though. I guarantee you, in years to come, we’re going to see more Jersey Girl style movies come out of Kevin Smith and one of them is going to break out of the “cult” pigeon hole and into the mainstream, causing a massive reappraisal on this film. Mark my words!
Mallrats
Like a lot of people I know, this was the first Kevin Smith film I ever saw. I think it’s to do with being just that bit ‘young’ when Clerks first broke theatrically and only hitting sixteen when it came to VHS. My first encounter with Kevin Smith’s output through this film, came one Bank Holiday weekend when my parents were away and I had the house to myself. Mallrats was showing on satellite TV and I’d snuck out to indulge in some underage drinking with my friends – too scared to have them back to my house in case it got trashed and I ended up chinned by my normally good natured parents! I came home in the early hours, as drunk as a teenager on the cusp of adulthood can get, and ‘found’ Mallrats on TV at like 1am or something. I missed about the first 20 minutes or something and just fell into it. I’d had a relatively strict upbringing so watching this kinda felt ‘naughty’ and really ‘adult’. Its humour was the sort of thing I’d never encountered before and the only thing I could compare it to was like a really dirty version of Dumb and Dumber, which – up until that point – had been about the most ‘naughty’ comedy I had ever encountered. By the time Jason Lee’s Brodie ‘stink-palmed’ Michael Rooker’s evil TV producer bad guy I was crying with laughter whilst my jaw was lying on the floor. The next morning, hung-over as hell, I remember going out and getting a TV magazine so that I could try and locate what the film was that I’d watched in my drunken stupor the night before. I had to try and link 8 word plot descriptions with what my memory could recall about the film and the TV Guide’s comment of ‘smutty teen comedy about slackers in a shopping mall’ set me off. I went out that day and hunted down a VHS copy of the film and watched it in full the same day. I just totally fell for the film. I became an instant Kevin Smith fan from that day forth, always stupidly shrugging off any desire to see Clerks as “the little black-and-white indie thing” that he did “to get noticed”. But then, on seeing that, the floodgates of worship opened up good and proper, let me tell you! This is a film that was destroyed critically, and commercially, when it was first released in 1995 but – currently – finds itself having even critics reappraising it with lines about it being “unjustly maligned” and “unloved but brilliant”. Such critics are like my beloved car; slow but they’ll get there eventually!
Yeah, I rate Jersey Girl above Dogma and dig the flick way more than is healthy and like Kevin Smith way more than is strictly heterosexual. So… flame me! That’s what the ATBs are here for!
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