Shane Life

Jake and I went to see Clerks 2 tonight. I’ve been looking forward to this movie for quite a while. Kevin Smith is one of my all-time favorite directors and I was anxious for it to come out.

The reviews on it have been really positive and it received an 8-minute standing ovation at Cannes, but it isn’t going to break any box-office records.

As far as the movie goes, it was pretty much what I expected. It was pretty over-the-top offensive, but it was in a wink-wink, nudge-nudge kind of way. Smith canonizes his uber-slackers Dante and Randal who have moved on from the Quick Stop to a Mooby’s managed by the new-to-the-Askewniverse Rosario Dawson. Dante is about to leave the Garden State for Florida to get married to his fiancee (played very well by Smith’s wife, Jennifer). Randal is up to his old antics and Jay and Silent Bob have moved from the Quick Stop to outside the Mooby’s. They provide some great physical comic relief in between Randal’s biting diatribes and Dante’s constant complaining.

Although in old age, the clerks have aged a little, they haven’t lost their edge. While Clerks 2 certainly has a lot more flash (and color!) than the original, it still manages to maintain its likability as a small indie flick. You have to appreciate people like the Weinsteins who give filmmakers like Smith millions of dollars and says, “make the movie that you want” which is exactly what Smith did.

One of the things I really liked about this movie was the new additions to the cast, Dawson as Becky and Trevor Fuhrman as Elias. Dawson seems completely at ease in Dante and Randal’s raunchy world, participating in their conversations. Fuhrman plays Elias, the ultra-Christian, Lord-of-the-Rings-loving co-worker who takes a lot of Randal’s verbal abuse. He’s really funny.

Overall, the movie is a statement about accepting your true self, no matter what that might be. I enjoyed it a lot…better than the first one, but I think that’s because it makes more sense to me these days and I can relate to characters who are searching for some greater purpose. For that, I give it two thumbs up with the disclaimer that you realize before seeing it that the language and content are more colorful than most movies. Just keep that in mind before seeing it.

Oh, how I wish I had gotten into this.

That would have been fun.

Silent Bob Speaks: The Collected Writings of Kevin Smith
by Kevin Smith
Rating: 9 out of 10

A lot of people call Kevin Smith vulgar. Some call him a “hack”. Some call him really really lucky (even he himself believes this). And some just call him Silent Bob. I call him one of the greatest storytellers alive.

“Indie Filmmaker Kevin Smith”, who has directed 6 films (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and Jersey Girl), tell stories. Silent Bob Speaks is a collection of writing that Smith did over the past several years for different magazines, newspapers and internet sites. He talks about everything from his homoerotic infatuation with Ben Affleck to his despise for Greasy Reese Witherspoon. He tackles his diagnosis as a morbidly obese man and his love for all things Jersey.

What first must be said about this book is that it is NOT A MEMIOR. It is a collection of articles and columns…some go together (the story of the making of Jersey Girl) and some don’t (his love letters…errr…interviews with two of the biggest movie stars on the planet, Affleck and Tom Cruise).

One thing remains constant: Smith can weave a story so well that you feel like you are a part of his life, hanging out on his shoulder and witnessing what it is like to be him. His ability to make his stories feel personal, despite their sometimes vulgar (the final “story” about ComiCon) and ridiculous (the aforementioned story about Ms. Witherspoon) content. I’ve read some of the articles before (particularly the ones that were published in the British magazine, Arena, as they were posted on Smith’s View Askew web site. That didn’t matter to me. His stories were just as funny the second time around.

My favorite of the stories is a long diatribe on why he loved the “train-wreck” that was Star Wars - Episode II, Attack of the Clones. In fact, his sentiments echoed my own thoughts on the movie a lot (I really did like it).

This book is a REALLY fast read. It took me a total of maybe 8 hours tops to get through it and I loved all of it. I even found myself laughing out loud to myself at the gym while I read it riding the bike. People would look at me and I’d just hold the book up and they’d look at me with this quizzical look.

I guess they don’t really get it.

But I did. And I loved it.

One of the funniest guys in Hollywood is finally getting his own sitcom.

While it is highly likely that he never wanted one and that’s why he’s never had one, I still think it is good news…something to look forward to in this bleak TV world, laced with derivative reality shows and stuff that just doesn’t live up to the hype.

I’m talking, of course, about Jason Lee.

Lee, whose antics stole the show in nearly all the Kevin Smith movies that he acted in, is going to star in a show called “My Name is Earl” in which he plays a low-rent crook who wins the lottery and uses his limited (but highly effective) intelligence to right former wrongs (if that sounds like I copied it, I basically did from the NewsAskew web site.

Sounds great so far, although I’m still mad that he isn’t playing Fletch in Smith’s Fletch Won.