Clerks

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🎙️ EPISODE 498: 06.28.22 review beings ~10:44 Clerks is a horrible film. There's just no way around that. To say it hasn't aged well isn't accurate either, because there's no way and in no world, this was ever "good" by anyone's definitions. And yet here we are. Reality is such that, in 2019, this very movie was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" work of art. Excuse me while I barf my guts out. The biggest issue this and all subsequent Kevin Smith works seem to have is that he desperately wants the audience to think he's smart while also being as crass as possible. This is not necessarily an impossible position to achieve, but Smith just falls flat on his face at every conceivable turn.

These actors aren't up for much of anything, but in service of a script where every sentence uttered either has A) a dozen or so extraneous words, B) some subtly vile homophobic or vaguely misogynistic underpinning, or — what is most often the case — C) a super fun combination of both A & B!

Much has been made of Smith's weird hangups with sex, so I won't belabor the point here (we'll do that in the Chasing Amy review!). Suffice to say, you shouldn't waste your time on his movies to begin with so who gives a shit. But having put myself through the pain, let me just tell you: it is real and it is spectacular. By the time Randall gets around to feverishly renting some "hermaphrodite/chicks with dicks!" porn (his words) that he just has to immediately watch WITH Dante AT THE convenience store, the entire psychological breakdown is clear: this is a man with deeply buried issues who just happens to be subconsciously working through them in a public medium which some (idiots) consider to be a landmark in independent filmmaking. And that fucking sucks ass!

But, for the sake of my sanity (I don't wanna be thinking about this anymore than I already have), let's focus on the myriad other reasons that this is a pile of trash.

Five seconds into Mallrats, you realize that Smith has no visual style. He has no flare for framing a shot, making the movement seem interesting or creating anything resembling a pleasant cinematic experience. His movies looks like garbage and I don't think this is debatable. Clerks sort of fakes its way through this problem via having been shot in black-and-white 16mm. A chimp could've manning the camera and it would have looked gritty and raw. And still, this is not his biggest sin.

Clerks is essentially a series of endless conversations, and never for a single second do any of them resemble an actual human interaction. So what this ostensibly ends up coming across as this: a bunch of shitty actors reading the weird, never funny, rambling, boring musings of a troubled nerd. Every counterpoint one character presents to another feels like Kevin hitting delete on a blog post he would have written that nobody would've ever read if he'd only been born five or ten years later. The luck of time haunts us all, and we're all sentenced to endure the plague of bad art created by a slew of shitty Gen-Xers who broke through in the mid 90s and will no doubt still be making the same shitty thing for at least the next thirty years.

I've plucked two clips out because I feel they speak to all of Kevin Smith's flaws. The first is somehow both lazy and implusive (let's shake the camera side to side!), and edge-Lordy and pathetic...


And the second featuring Jason Mewes who — and I am not fucking kidding — is the only good actor in Clerks. He's the only actor who doesn't offer line reads like they have a gun to their head dictating some maniac's manifesto, word for fucking word. And still, in this, perhaps the single genuine moment in the entire film, Smith has to stamp the scene with a gay slur out of left field. The man has always been trying to sell a version of cool that was fucked from the word go and no amount of irony and/or stoner apathy can cloak his closet conservatism...


So fuck 'em. Don't watch this movie, or any of his movies. In fact, skip ahead to episode 499 right now!

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 497 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 498B ⫸

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Clerks is a 1994 American black-and-white comedy buddy film written, produced and directed by Kevin Smith and starring Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson. It presents a day in the lives of store clerks Dante Hicks (O'Halloran) and Randal Graves (Anderson) and their acquaintances. It is the first of Smith's View Askewniverse films, and introduces several recurring characters, notably Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Smith). It was released on October 19, 1994.