[DVD Review (R1)] SOLD OUT: A THREEVENING WITH KEVIN SMITH
I like Kevin Smith. What can I say? I like his movies, I like the way he comes across in the press, I like how he presents himself as a father and a husband and – as you all know from Issue # 6 of OFF THE SHELF – I like his An Evening With… DVDs a great deal too.
So, having adored An Evening With Kevin Smith and An Evening With Kevin Smith: Evening Harder, when I put on Sold Out: A Threevening With Kevin Smith, I did it with absolutely no reservations as to the fact that I would flat out adore it. I know someone who went to see him in Canada and they said that his Q+A went on for close to seven hours. I asked whether it didn’t drag on or get a little bit stale after the four hour mark or something. His answer was “No! Not for a second!” Smith is probably the only filmmaker I can think of who could get up in front of his fans and talk effortlessly and humorously for SEVEN plus hours. Spike Lee? Yeah, he’d be great company but seven hours? Nah. The Coen Brothers? Like you’d get them to talk for half an hour let alone seven!
So trust me when I tell you that for the first hour of this two disc set (which, with deleted footage, equates to five hours of Mr Smith and his anecdotes) I was shifting in my seat uncomfortably and a little… well… bored.
Smith, once the preliminaries are out of the way, talks about his dogs and one of his dog’s broken vagina as a result of a sexual assault from one of his other dogs and, as reasonably amusing as it all is, it goes on and on and on… the first hour is pretty much taken up with this one topic. And I sat back in my chair and thought “Well, I’ve always wondered if there’d be a time when Smith would run out of stories to tell to a crowd of fans, and I guess that time has come!”
BUT with that first hour out of the way, Smith settles in and we start to get anecdotes on Clerks II and Die Hard 4.0 and everything that was great about the first two Q+A DVDs comes to the forefront. Smith is telling, relaxed, easily hysterical and Sold Out becomes immensely watchable. It’s just frustrating that, as a question-and-answer session, this is a little under-whelming [there's only about six or seven questions asked]. I’ve always pushed my friends to watch Smith’s “stand-up” DVDs and they always try and convince me that the sessions are a hell of a lot more scripted then not. I’ve always stood against that. I’ve never bought that for one second. Smith has always been too free-flowing for that. Plus, I don’t believe he can “control” every question he gets asked on the night he “tapes”.
However, watching Sold Out, you can sort of buy into this suggested theory a little. It’s obvious from watching this that, whilst answering the popular topics through Q+A, there’s a lot of subjects, gags, asides and anecdotes that he wants to “perform” and has prepared. There’s set-pieces where he goes off on tangent for up to thirty minutes at a time. Obvious kudos has to be extended, though, to the fact that – like the best stand-up comedians out there – he always manages to find his way back to the point at hand.
Smith is still an absolute stellar “bitch” (see his asides on both Hayden Christensen and Timothy Olyphant) and the discussion about his time on the set of Die Hard 4.0 is the obvious stand-out; worthy of being put up alongside his anecdotes about Superman Lives, Tim Burton, Jon Peters and Prince from the first sublime DVD.
Small frustrations exist when you see that conversation on subjects like Red State are given no more then a couple of minutes – in the Deleted Scenes section! Yet, taking the first hour out, this is still an excellent, very funny time in the company of Kevin Smith. If you like him and you like his “style” then you’ll like this. This won’t convert any non-Smith fans, but then again it’s not designed to is it? I’d love to give this ‘five popcorns’ like the first two, but taking that first fifty to sixty minutes into account, I can’t. But overall, I did enjoy the hell out of it. I just wonder whether it might be time for a DVD collection of his Q+A’s to take a leave of absence until he’s got Zack & Miri / Red State and a lot more out of the way so he has a lot more to talk about then just his little dog’s extended, butchered vagina.
3 Responses to “[DVD Review (R1)] SOLD OUT: A THREEVENING WITH KEVIN SMITH”
He has gotten so immensely obese lately. I saw pics of him at the Z&M premiere and the guy looks like he’s pushing 450, easy. He has GOT to lose some weight.
He has said in his blog that if anyone catches him with junk food in the month of November they’re allowed to kick his ass!
He doesn’t look too bad in this DVD like. He’s never looked gaunt or nothing, but he certainly doesn’t look out of shape or particularly obese!
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