Would You Review Me? I'd Review Me.

Just like the midgets in Lord of the Rings, we walk from one end of the Jersey Series, we travel to the other. Except we skip all the middle bits. And there’s no Orcs. And we aren’t walking. So it’s not like the midgets in Lord of The Rings at all...Today’s film is Clerks 2.

Made a decade after the first, Clerks 2 sees Dante and Randall still working their lousy jobs at the strip mall. A fire puts paid to that and they soon find new jobs at a local Mooby’s fast food emporium. Cut to a year later, and it’s Dante’s last day on the job as he’s moving to Florida with his fiancé, Emma. Also along for the ride are the boys’ boss, Becky; Elias, the world’s nicest guy (and hero worshipper of Randall) and the new and improved Jay and Silent Bob.

Once again, the day finds the guys (and now gals) musing on life, love, sex, pop culture, religion and race. However, the big topic of the day is Dante’s upcoming nuptials. It seems that our Mr Dante has himself some second thoughts, and has gone and done something a little stupid with Becky. So, it’s up to Randall, Jay, Bob and yes, even Elias, to show Dante where his true loves lay. And it ain’t in Florida. And how do they do this? By organising the greatest bachelor party ever featuring the greatest entertainment ever – Kinky Kelly and The Sexy Stud. Yes, folks, this comedy features a donkey show (“interspecies erotica, fucko!”) and it is hilarious. Needless to say, things go horribly awry – but everyone learns a jolly good lesson.

It’s good to see that time has not dulled Dante or Randall with the two characters remaining just as sharp as ever (thankfully this is due to the fact that the actors behind them remain just as likeable as ever). In fact, if time has done anything to them, it has given them more heart (regardless of the fact that Randall’s first major diatribe is against the handicapped...and that is him being good) – and you can tell that these are two guys who have basically had themselves to depend on for the past decade, moving from mere friends to outright being brothers. They aren’t the only ones who have changed, though, as Jay has gone from a drug fiend to a more irascible “lovable lout” (no doubt reflecting the change in life that Jason Mewes himself has gone through since the first film).

And let’s not forget the new additions to the happy little family. Rosario Dawson’s  Becky is a perfect foil for the boys, and the fact that she is a strong, ballsy woman makes her presence so much better. She is able to give as good as she gets, and in some cases steamrolling right over them and flat refusing to put up with any of Randall’s shenanigans. However, as great as she is, it is Elias that truly shines, both as a character and as Trevor Fuhrman, the actor behind him. As a character, he is like nothing that Smith has ever had in his casts – someone who wants to do good just because it’s the right thing to do. He’s such a happy, innocent counterpoint to the bitterness of the others that his presence is a pure breath of fresh air – and it’s simply amazing that he works so well with them, he’s almost the anti-Jay.

Out of the numerous differences between this and the first, the most prominent is Clerks 2 is (asides from the first and last scenes) entirely in colour. And that really works, especially to highlight the difference between the soul crushing grey world of a crappy strip mall, and the bright and happy (but no less soul crushing) world of fast food. The whole world just seems to pop more, especially during the “for no reason at all” musical number about halfway through.

Not only is Clerks 2 a more than worthy sequel and addition (closer?) to the Jersey Series, but on reflection, I think it goes down as my favourite of the lot.

This Review Isn't Even Supposed To Be Here Today

Today’s film is one of the big names in 90’s indie cinema and its story is pretty well known among film fans. Made for under $30k, it ended up grossing over $3M just in the cinema alone (and pulling in way more than that in home sales). It launched the career of Kevin Smith and helped change the way that the filmmaking process was looked at. Today’s film is Clerks (and, as a plug, has also been covered over at Jaded Hope).

The first film in Smith’s Jersey Series, Clerks is basically the film that is held up as “the little movie that could” for non-mainstream filmmakers. And because Smith is a big subscriber to the school of Write What You Know, it’s set in a location very familiar to him –a strip mall in suburban New Jersey (and not even a good strip mall – all it has is a convenience store and a shitty video store).

The plot revolves around a day in the life of two convenience store clerks – Dante (Brian O’Halloran), the hapless and hopeless clerk at Quik-Stop; and the wisecracking and acerbic Randall (Jeff Anderson), video store monkey at the neighbouring RST Video. During the day, the duo wax lyrical on all manner of subjects, from love, to sex, to shitty customers, to the people working aboard The Death Star and all subjects in between. In addition to our heroes, we also have our first introduction of Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith) as well as Dante’s girlfriend, Veronica and ex-girlfriend, Caitlin.

Even though he is not even supposed to be there that day, Dante still gets strongarmed by his boss into coming in – and spends the day whining about it, as it’s clearly a job he’s doing just to make ends meet. Randall, on the other hand, makes no bones as to how much he hates his job and the customers it draws in. To prove how mind numbing and unfulfilling their jobs are, during the day the close the stores multiple times, to go to a funeral, to play hockey and even to go rent movies from a good video store.

Yes, long before Clerks was made people had been making and distributing films on a shoestring budget, going into debt to see their dreams become a reality. And hell, even in the few years before he hit the scene, so-called Indie Filmmakers were getting themselves known. But, Clerks was the first major time that the aspects of Indie Filmmaking had come together to strike a chord with more mainstream audiences – naturalistic dialogue, intimate locations, a plot that didn’t feel like it had been churned out after being approved by a committee.

Now, for a bit of controversy, as much as I dig on this film and can watch it pretty much whenever, I do find long stretches of it to be quite boring and even a little forced. As clever as a lot of the dialogue is (no, not in terms of witty wordplay, rather it’s more pop-culture centered which, for the time, was a breath of fresh air), some of it definitely comes off as clunky and even in a couple of places, a little WSD. For example, following a mixup that leads to Caitlin getting intimate with a corpse (a situation that I have always found to be pretty clunky in and of itself), in the ambulance as both her and the corpse are being removed, the ambulance driver says, “what kind of convenience store are you running here?” I am also not a huge fan of the gimmick of breaking the film up into chapters by the use of a big word that makes me feel that all Smith did was open a dictionary and find something vaguely covering what he wanted to do in that segment (I later found out that this is exactly what he did).

Don’t let that fool you, though, I don’t hate the film by any stretch. I just find that it has been surpassed by pretty much everything that Smith put out afterwards, as well it should be, given that Clerks was Smith’s first film. Plus, the main performances are all pretty likeable, even when they are being obnoxious douche bags. Both O’Halloran and Anderson are the kind of guys that you feel like you could hang out with for a while and just shoot the shit, and that makes for two darn good performances. And seeing Jason Mewes barely out of being a kid, you can see how he and Smith would become such fast friends that Smith even went to the wall for the kid during his long struggle with various addictions.

Seeing what Smith came up with for his first film, and just how strongly it resonated with people, it’s no shock that he picked up a LOT of very loyal fans, a lot who have stuck with him to this day (myself included).  All in all, given what has come from Smith since then, especially within the Jersey Series, I feel that Clerks is possibly the weakest film in the series. It’s a nice introduction to some well loved characters, but some now-clunky dialogue and happenings push it to the lower rungs overall.