Kevin Smith, without me noticing, made a third Clerks film, released Summer 2022. I’m not a Smith superfan by any means, but I would be lying if his films did not sit somewhere between guilty pleasure and cinematic comfort food. We’re not far apart in age, and his 90s output (I originally wrote oeuvre but got over myself) put his characters at my age, too. His stuff is relatable to me. I’ll say up front I find Kevin Smith’s comedy funny. If you don’t, I doubt the film or this post will change your mind. The guy was, and remains, famously Marmite.
The first Smith film I actually saw was 1997’s Chasing Amy, and I immediately loved the snappy, shit-talking dialogue, endless Star Wars references, and admittedly crass humour. I didn’t see Clerks – the Smith film – until a little later, and while I enjoyed it, the film didn’t grab me the way it did some people, but I did like the chemistry Dante and Randall displayed. At that time, Randall seemed interchangeable with Chasing Amy’s Binky (Jason Lee); to me the characters were written very similarly, but this is me splitting hairs, honestly.
In 2006 I was living with a Kevin Smith fan (at the time, I doubt he is now) who was a real child of the always-online internet, and I got swept up in what seemed like tremendous buzz around Clerks 2. There were web shorts showing behind-the-scenes stuff; long before it was fashionable. YouTube was in its infancy, Facebook was barely out of Zuckerberg’s balls, Tom was still shitting up your MySpace. Smith had a canny knack for the internet’s marketing potential, definitely. Everyone does it these days.
People say Kevin Smith isn’t a good filmmaker, but I don’t know enough about the art to notice. I think it is one of those perceptions that isn’t accurate but nevertheless persists. Zack & Miri was good. Red State was good. I ‘know what I like’ as twats say, and Clerks 2 delivered for me. It did feel a bit more SoCal, a bit Hollywood? Polished and whittled. It was a Miramax product, just before Smith parted ways after Zack & Miri underperformed. Definitely lost a bit of that Jersey patina.
I still think it holds up well. I did struggle a little with Dante and Becky (Rosario Dawson) having a relationship because to paraphrase Stirling Archer she was so out of his league it was practically inter-species mating. But I rationalised it as them being the exception that proves the rule. That’s a thing, right? You see these beautiful women with guys that look like Shrek and you wonder how that happens.
Clerks III is good. Someone on Reddit (yes, I know…) said it was the best thing Smith made in a decade. Maybe. As I watched it, I had the impression that – as much as I enjoyed the second film – this perhaps could have been it. It feels – by design – much closer to the first film, because without giving much away it basically follows the first film’s beat very closely. Yes, there is a film within a film. Yes, it works.
It’s autobiographical. Smith had a serious heart attack not long ago, and that’s the motivation for one of the characters in this third entry. What the film really pulls off is being genuinely affectionate towards its subject, fans, and earlier films. It is, at the risk of sounding like a tit, sincere. I said ‘comfort food’ earlier. Or maybe like a cigarette with a sharp beer, after a shit day at work. It gives you what you expect, and what you want. Of course, you have to like that kind of thing in the first place, and if you don’t, you’re not about to start. I don’t think I could recommend it to someone that doesn’t know, or more importantly, enjoys the View Askew universe, but it would be interesting to find out.
There’s a great scene where Randall is describing what is very obviously (if you’re a fan) The Mandalorian and the CGI regenerated Luke Skywalker turning up and just fucking everything up, like a virtuous stud. He’s so hot and young you don’t give a shit he’s not real. This is in contrast to the Sunday morning haggard and bitter Luke we see in The Last Jedi. Young, ass-kicking Luke – yes, the Luke of our childhood – is all we ever wanted, even if it’s not real.
This is a good metaphor for the film – it services the fan, which is treated like a regressive thing now, but the film is built on the premise that, why not? It’s okay to indulge and to be indulged, to relive the salad days of 30yrs ago, just for a couple of hours. We all die, soon enough.
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