Sunday, March 08, 2009

I'd say it was cartoonish--except that the Clerks cartoon was actually funny.


Early this morning, because it was on Comedy Central, I decided finally to give Kevin Smith's Clerks II a try. I had been reluctant to pay any money for it either in the theater or on DVD...and I was right to trust that feeling.

Oh, my god. This is where laughter goes to die.

I will say this for it: It's rare that a movie so perfectly encapsulates itself as this one does in the scene where Smith's Silent Bob, cued to give one of his sermons, opens his mouth, hesitates, shrugs and says, "No, I got nothin."

As an audience silently thinks, "We know." Just as in Jersey Girl, Smith shows here that he has nothing to offer but clichés ("Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.") and shallow pop culture riffs (The Transformers: A gift from god, or unholy curse?).

Oh, and I also loved the scene where Randall wonders why Dante always (in other words, in both movies) has a couple of hot chicks to choose from. I loved it, because again the answer is obvious: He's Smith's surrogate and wish-fulfillment character.

(Smith chose to cast his own wife as Dante's domineering fiancé, whom he must throw over to find true happiness with the bouncy hottie Rosario Dawson. I wouldn't touch the psychological implications of that with a 10-foot pole.)

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