I know I was supposed to write about Hoop Dreams, but it’s been years since I have seen it and I wanted to give it a fair shot. Instead, please find my thoughts below on Clerks, a movie I should have loved, but found to be tedious, obnoxious, and only sporadically funny.
Clerks has some hilarious moments. But Director Kevin Smith is not afraid to drive a point home ad nauseum. I can’t remember… was Dante supposed to be working that day or not? Clerks showed promise, and comedy is hard, but I do expect improvement in the craft. With Smith, there is no improvement. I could deal with his achieving a career based on this Clerks, however sloppy the film is, but the iconic rockstar status he achieved blows my mind. Still, I don’t hate Kevin Smith, I just hate things about him and his zealous defenders. 
I hate that he apologized for Mallrats. I hate that his fans accepted it, and now embrace the movie. I hate how you can’t hate the guy; you criticize him for his shoddy production valus or the rambling speeches that fill his movies, and the Smithites say it’s part of the charm. I hate that a mediocre talkfest like Chasing Amy is treated with reverence – Kevin Smith gets serious, swoon! I hate that Clerks II got an eight-minute standing ovation – eight minutes! – at some film festival, I can’t remember which one. Let me look it up… let’s see, it was… CANNES?!
Putain de merde, Cannes!
That this guy is granted auteur status is surely a sign of the apocalypse.
The back story on Clerks is the stuff of Hollywood fairy tales. A guy sells his comic book collection for $27,000, makes a movie, gets into Sundance, Miramax buys it, it makes millions, and a career is launched. More movies, comic books, and a speaking tour (Seriously? Seriously?!) follow. I thought I would love Clerks. I loved Smith’s grit and determination, which reminded me of course of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. But when I saw the movie I thought, “Where’d the other $24,000 go?” But that’s a part of the charm!
I can actually buy that with one movie, made for peanuts, but all of his movies look bad.
Yes, I confess, I’m jealous. And in a weird way, proud of Kevin Smith. People keep waiting for Tarantino to fail, but he keeps making good movies. Smith keeps making bad ones, and no one wants to admit it! Okay, they admitted it with Cop Out, but his fans sniff, “Well, he didn’t write it.” My jealousy doesn’t negate my criticism, because after all, I’m also jealous of Tarantino, Judd Apatow, Jack Black, the Farrelly Brothers, and all University of Alabama football fans. But I like everybody else on that list, except Paul Finbaum, head cheerleader for UA. I think Smith’s an amusing guy whose movies are embraced as works of genius. That he’s in on it, and admits he’s a hack, dulls some of the sting.
You just don’t get it! The Smithites say, and they’re right. I don’t get how the following comedies can be rated below Clerks on Imdb:
There’s Something About Mary
Bottle Rocket
Broadcast News
Bull Durham
Slap Shot
Way Out West
Airplane!
The Gods Must Be Crazy (indeed!)
Tootsie
Blazing Saddles
I can only hope that when you control for the foul-mouthed insane nerd vote, Clerks ranks below Cabin Boy, because no rational person can believe that Clerks is better than any movie on the above list. Can they? Can they?!
Okay, so how does a movie I don’t like make the cut in a series about The Best Year Ever? Well, because it wasn’t just the best year ever in terms of quality, but in terms of what was happening at the multiplex too. Clerks, along with Pulp Fiction, helped to cement Miramax’s foothold in the industry, which in turn helped in the mainstreaming of independent film. After crashing the Oscars for a couple of years with arthouse fare that no one saw like My Left Foot and The Piano…zzzzzzzzzzzz…sorry, I dozed off thinking about The Piano… anyway, in 1994, Miramax finally became a brand, recognizable outside the arthouse. More importantly, independent film became way more mainstream.
In that sense, I cannot deny that Clerks is an important movie. It was fun, and Smith has certainly accomplished more than I have, and probably ever will, in the industry. I just wish he wasn’t so obnoxious (witness his snipes at Tim Burton), overly sensitive (witness his whining when Burton sniped back), and sloppy (witness any of his movies). For his next magic act, Smith turns to the horror genre. In Red State, Smith aims to repackage Democrat loon Fred Phelps as a psychotic (is there another kind?) conservative Republican. Let’s see who calls him on it.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.