Kevin Smith: Vox populi

[Zot!]

I think Hughes' "regional" comment is insightful. The charm and defining thing for Kevin Smith's first few films, is giving voice to the wasted potential of the reasonably intelligent college aged, conspicuously not going to college, and "existing" in a exceedingly unsexy American suburban milieu. Not life on the margins, not collegiate, and not even slacker but what one might called "underserved". I won't stand by this bit of hyperbole, but he had the wasted potential to be more like a guileless, Americana Mike Leigh. He lost the plot very quickly though, and he's got no talent for the fantastical, or much at all really.

[domino harvey]

I thought Dogma was brilliant when I was in high school. It’s unavailability in recent years does not allow me to confirm my suspicions that I was just a lot dumber then.

Never really cared for any of the other Smith movies I’ve seen or the man himself, buuuut Clerks: the Animated Series was actually really funny, almost surely thanks to Seinfeld’s David Mandel being highly involved. Two memorable conceptual jokes from the show’s short run that I am certain Smith did not come up with: the second episode is a clip show pulling from the first episode, and there’s also a bottle episode about unseen things happening outside the store, which is of course pointless in an animated series since you can show anything!

[beamish14]

I thought Dogma was brilliant when I was in high school. It’s unavailability in recent years does not allow me to confirm my suspicions that I was just a lot dumber then.

Never really cared for any of the other Smith movies I’ve seen or the man himself, buuuut Clerks: the Animated Series was actually really funny, almost surely thanks to Seinfeld’s David Mandel being highly involved. Two memorable conceptual jokes from the show’s short run that I am certain Smith did not come up with: the second episode is a clip show pulling from the first episode, and there’s also a bottle episode about unseen things happening outside the store, which is of course pointless in an animated series since you can show anything!

I’m partial to portions of the animated series, but the DVD commentaries are often funnier than the episodes themselves. There is one joke about American vs. British meanings of the word “fag” that is just interminable, but I remember another about the Challenger disaster that is actually funny and risqué. I also like how the show creates a deep mythology around the township of Leonardo, New Jersey, and has Alec Baldwin portraying its scion

[furbicide]

I’m not reading beyond that excerpt, because these comparisons are more of a stretch than the waistband on Kevin Smith’s favorite pair of JNCOs

Agreed 100%. Pinkerton is no dummy and he's written insightful stuff before, but that also means he knows what he's doing with this piece (i.e., lionizing a director on the basis of ginned-up personal affection more than anything) in a way that a breathless undergraduate would not. I am, however, sad to see that you did not take the bait of his ICP comparison!

I read that second paragraph as at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek ("I had to learn more"). The entire piece is far from adulatory; he basically concedes from the outset that Smith isn’t a good filmmaker and that much or all of his work from Dogma on sucks. But what I like about the piece is that he keeps coming back, finding something poignant and relatable in the later work (particularly the Clerks sequels).

I suspect we all have a director or two whose work we know isn’t any good, yet we keep finding ourselves drawn back to their films for reasons we can’t entirely explain – for me, that’d be late Woody Allen, for instance. I find it refreshing to read a piece that wanders out of the realm of good taste (anyone can like brilliant filmmakers, after all!) and into that more nebulous, subjective realm of personal connection.

[therewillbeblus]

I thought Dogma was brilliant when I was in high school. It’s unavailability in recent years does not allow me to confirm my suspicions that I was just a lot dumber then.

Same, I had the two-disc special edition DVD set, which I watched many, many times, but not in like 20 years

I think Mallrats is hilarious though- 100% tied to specific nostalgias of rewinding scenes with my friend over and over. The running joke of the kid on the escalator and its punchline, Affleck’s sincerely-pitched “15? I thought she was 36” explanation, and Jason Lee’s entire eviscerations of Gil’s Nice Guy BS are comedy gold. Stuff like the chocolate covered pretzel bits threaten to ruin it, but the strengths outweigh the trash. It’s my favorite KS, not that that’s saying much of anything at all when you like two of his movies

[Mr Sausage]

Haven’t seen it in nearly 20 years, but Chasing Amy is still my favourite for the risks it takes. Not just its refusal to end on a typical rom-com resolution, but its willingness to risk using an outwardly offensive trope, that a gay girl just needs to find the right man, to explore a more complex space of sexual fluidity, one the movie shows facing rejection from both ends of the spectrum. And I like it for being upfront and clear-eyed about its hero’s deep flaws. He’s fragile, judgemental, and uncomfortable outside of his small world. Despite Smith’s penchant for overstatement, the movie ends on a perfect note of understatement.

[knives]

I’m all honesty even his switch away from being indie to being independent had some potential to it. Red State is a mess, but it’s his most ambitious since Dogma and suggested new ground for him, but it’s critical failure seems to have forced him into a bubble.

[therewillbeblus]

Haven’t seen it in nearly 20 years, but Chasing Amy is still my favourite for the risks it takes. Not just its refusal to end on a typical rom-com resolution, but its willingness to risk using an outwardly offensive trope, that a gay girl just needs to find the right man, to explore a more complex space of sexual fluidity, one the movie shows facing rejection from both ends of the spectrum. And I like it for being upfront and clear-eyed about its hero’s deep flaws. He’s fragile, judgemental, and uncomfortable outside of his small world. Despite Smith’s penchant for overstatement, the movie ends on a perfect note of understatement.

I just remember the running gag of Lee's contributions being dismissed as a "tracer", which is actually pretty funny

[Mr Sausage]

“I’ll trace a chalk line around your dead fucking body!”

Jason Lee was always great delivering Smith lines.

[hearthesilence]

“I’ll trace a chalk line around your dead fucking body!”

Jason Lee was always great delivering Smith lines.

This is true. He was one of the few things I liked about Mallrats.

[therewillbeblus]

I'd go so far as to say he's like 98% of what works about Mallrats, but because almost every line he delivers is fire, it's still Smith's best

[flyonthewall2983]

I like Clerks for the “regional” aspect. It knows it’s a subpar movie but it really makes the most of it for me. As for Smith himself I like him in interviews, even if a bit prickly in his younger days he sure was sharp on a lot even if he had genuinely no idea he was working for the devil.

I’d like to think without Weinstein he’d probably keep making movies like Clerks instead of agreeing to budgets maybe too large for some of his concepts to be pulled off artfully. Dogma told with the kind of lower quality production he had just a few years before would probably stand to come off better now.

[therewillbeblus]

Haven’t seen it in nearly 20 years, but Chasing Amy is still my favourite for the risks it takes. Not just its refusal to end on a typical rom-com resolution, but its willingness to risk using an outwardly offensive trope, that a gay girl just needs to find the right man, to explore a more complex space of sexual fluidity, one the movie shows facing rejection from both ends of the spectrum. And I like it for being upfront and clear-eyed about its hero’s deep flaws. He’s fragile, judgemental, and uncomfortable outside of his small world. Despite Smith’s penchant for overstatement, the movie ends on a perfect note of understatement.

I just revisited this for the first time in about 20 years myself, and it's aged tremendously well. The way Smith treats the enigma of sexuality, and our preoccupations with explaining or achieving a sense of control on it is pitched with maturity, in a relatively understated treatment for the filmmaker (well, that is, until he himself dictates the themes succinctly later on). It's surprisingly realistic and respectful to the topic, and the same goes for all vehicles used to explore these nebulous obstacles for connection. It's not just Affleck's flaws that are lucid, but all the characters'- Lee is homophobic and resentful and jealous, but also loyal and caring and interested in the lives of his friend and even in Adams' 'threat', who serves as a trigger to evoke his own sensitivities, which are empathized with rather than diagnosed as mean-spirited behaviorism. Adams is posing as wholly self-actualized but reveals that her confidence in self-knowledge is also subject to change, pivoting between stages and donning identities that are authentic in each vacuumed state, but false insofar as she's posing as someone who clings to only one, when she's far more fluid and layered and complex than her idealized version of herself as consistently self-assured. The objectivity with which Smith frames the action allows empathy for these characters to not usurp but to balance their critique, and vice versa. Homophobic, jealous, and dishonest reactivities to triggers are not shamed but held up and engaged with, through the other characters' messily organic responses to them, which leaves no heroes- just people.

This is an outlier in Smith's filmography- he carried a form of humanism into Dogma, but this is the only film where he's allows people to be complicated with restraint, not emphasizing his ethos repeatedly in the script's text, at least until the last act when fear-based narcissistic male fragility is confronted and dissected. But here's where the film takes on even greater value- burying a deeper punchline of ache beneath the already raw exterior of unpacking ignorance and vulnerability: Affleck's psychological summary of everyone in the love triangle is absurd, self-seeking, and misinformed in how forceful and confident his conclusions are, just as Silent Bob's preached revelation from hindsight is pithy and unfair in its winky Movie-Climax-induced assumption that we can ingest sage advice and overcome our self-centered reactivity, even if we feel moved by it. He's coercing us into a cinematic fantasy reflexively via narrative devices and then slapping us in the face with realism, just as Adams slaps Affleck at the end of the faux-climactic scene that deflates right with the egoism of the "protagonist." It's a smart movie. I'm not sure I can ever prefer this to the nostalgia of Mallrats' potent humor, but this is a special indie love story that inverts the idea of a romance and stews in the plights of platonic intimacy and confusion of self, more than the actual feelings of attraction between two people and how they communicate around this, which is the easiest part and already well-trodden material. If relationships are a series of stages where two people continually need to sign up together around conflicts that affect them both in unique ways, this is a movie about that, in all its forms.