Clerks II

The original Clerks works because it doesn't really work. The performances are largely atrocious. There is no artistry whatsoever to the filmmaking. That's not even an insult. Writer/director Kevin Smith was compelled to put these characters and this situation and this dialogue to film, but he wasn't really trying to do anything with the visuals. You sense, if he could have gotten exposure by publishing the screenplay, he might just as well have gone that route.

Looking back, Clerks stands as one of the best encapsulations of the whole '90s indie Sundance aesthetic. An unknown guy from New Jersey, armed with relatively inexpensive equipment, tells an extremely simple story with deliriously funny, filthy dialogue about a pair of hapless, amotivational losers who work numbing retail jobs. The style perfectly matches the content - lazy, tossed off, novice but also deeply personal and genuine. The actors are Smith's friends, the sets are real locations in his hometown and the experiences are based on his own years working dumb, mindless jobs, and this stark honesty comes through in every scene and every joke.

What's remarkable about the film is how little Smith gets away with actually showing on-screen. Certainly, if even half of the activities discussed in the film were visualized, Clerks would be banned in this and every other country. But pretty much all the action in the film is merely discussed, not presented. Part of this is necessity. Smith couldn't afford the time or the money to set up and execute sequences in multiple locations. So people come into the convenience store and inform the audience as to what was happening, to spare us the trouble of travelling around.

The writing is just so entertaining, the dialogue so spry and descriptive, Smith manages to get away with the logic and cinematic gaps on charm alone.

Bearing all this in mind, it's clear that Clerks II was doomed from the start.

(1) It's no longer based on real experiences.

Smith hasn't spent his 30's working a stupid job at a fast food restaurant like hsi characters. He's spent his 30's having a successful career as a film director and Geek Hero, building a legion of obsessive fans, marrying an attractive blonde (Jennifer Schwalbach, who appears in the film as clerk Dante's fiancee) and starting a family. The guy's busy, like an industry unto himself. (Let's not forget, in addition to making films, he writes comic books, he produces other people's films, he owns a comic book store in Westwood, he acts and pops up in documentaries and TV shows and he blogs. He even has a popular DVD featuring him having a Question and Answer session. It's so popular, there's a sequel coming out next week! A Q&A sequel!) It seems hard for him to really connect to the mindset of a bunch of slackers like Dante and Randal, so when it comes time at the end for him to resolve their deep personal issues, he's left to reach for generalizations and platitudes.

(2) Dante and Randal are no longer relatable.

These guys are too smart and resourceful to work at a fast food joint at their age, and Kevin Smith knows it. He clearly now sees his heroes, Dante and Randal, as somewhat pathetic. He's not wrong about that but he's written himself into a corner. In order for this story to work, they have to still be clerking after a decade, and for him, this means they are overgrown man-children who are constantly stigmatized, dejected and depressed.

(3) Smith's budget and resources now clash with the story.

As I said, the first film ideally matched grainy, on-the-cheap black-and-white cinematography to a story about guys who can't get their shit together. Now we're seeing a movie about those same guys, played by the same two amateurs (Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson), but on a Hollywood set in glossy, flourescent color cinematography surrounded by a few capable, professional actors. The shit clashes. You begin to notice the shortcomings that didn't matter so much in such a casual, outsider oddity like the first movie.

(4) Smith has really been making this movie over and over again for 12 years.

In the time since Clerks, Smith has never once stepped away from this exact kind of story and film. Mallrats simply melded the dialogue of Clerks with cheesy '80s teen comedy (with disastrous results). Chasing Amy melded the dialogue and outlook of Clerks with a painful sub-Cameron Crowe relationship drama. Dogma melded Clerks-style dialogue (and two of the main characters from Clerks) with heavy-handed Catholic overtones. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was another Clerks-style road movie, also with the Clerks drug-dealing duo Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Smith). And Jersey Girl abandoned the indie pretensions and the smut and infamously went for mainstream romantic comedy.

He's never strayed from this world, so Clerks II doesn't feel fresh or momentous or exciting for fans. It's just more of the same.



Okay, so those are the reasons this sequel was doomed from the start. As for why it doesn't work as an actual film...Well, how much time do you guys have? I'll try to keep this as brief as possible.

It's really really ugly. Smith has never been much of a visionary as a director, but he's been making films since the early '90s. Is it too much to ask that he try to improve a little? This is his worst looking film yet, a garish mixture of eye-melting yellows and purples that's lit like it was filmed entirely inside a colorblind dentist's office.

Dante and Randal are supposed to be in their early 30's but this harsh lighting makes it look like twice that. It's actually kind of gross. Their faces look all pockmarked and scarred, like they go to Seal's dermatologist.

Lighting aside, Smith's bumbling camera doesn't do anyone any favors. In one of the many scenes in which Dante and Randal have a circular argument, Smith swings the camera around them in tight, swift little ovals, all the while cutting between different angles. The effect is actually nauseating.

Still, no one expects sumptuous eye candy from this guy. If the script were half as good as the original, I wouldn't even bring it up. But unfortunately, the writing feels 10 different kinds of desperate. Like "random buttcheesk in the background" desperate. Characters breaking into song desperate. Silly facial hair desperate. Cake-throwing desperate. And nothing kills off comedy quicker than flopsweat.

I posited above the theory that Smith can't relate to Dante and Randal any more, so he can't figure out how to give their story any resonance all these years later. But that doesn't explain why he can't give them more funny shit to talk about and say. Clerks is fucking quotable:

"Hey, I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule."

"Empire had the better ending. Luke gets his hand cut off by Boba Fett, Han gets frozen in carbonite. It's a bunch of downers. That's what life is. A serious of down endings. All Jedi had was a bunch of Muppets."

Smith always gives himself one line of dialogue as Silent Bob per movie, generally summing up the main character's key dilemma and providing a possible shot at redemption. In this film, when his big moment arrives, Smith says, "I've got nuthin'." Is that an actual admission, a sly moment of candor in the midst of a sarcasm fest?

Dante and Randal were losers in the first movie, forced to bear harrassment by customers and indignities at the hands of employers, but they nevertheless seemed like fun guys to be around. Spending 90 minutes with them was an enjoyable diversion. But without the zippy dialogue and sheer enthusiasm of the first go-around, they seem like two sad bastards.

Randal's previous antics, which included ditching work to play hockey and rent movies, knocking over a casket during a funeral and renting hermaphrodite porn, were just outrageous enough to be surprising and funny. Now, he's more creepy weirdo than lovable slob. He boasts about seducing underage girls, works overtime to break up his best friend's relationship, cruelly taunts a religious teenaged co-worker (Trevor Fehrman) and organizes a gay donkey show. He seems less and less like a snarky friend and more and more like a potential felon.

Smith revisits his Chasing Amy idea about close male friendships eventually morphing into a powerful but latent homosexual affair. Just as Ben Affleck's and Jason Lee's characters in Amy love one another, with Affleck eventually concluding that they should share a woman in order to feel closer, Clerks II focuses on the damage Dante's love life introduces to Randal's already tentative grip on reality. Basically, Randal's existence only makes sense if Dante's around. Without a best friend to make sarcastic quips to, Randal realizes that he's just a pathetic loner.

So we get a scene with the guys ditching work to ride around on a go-kart track while "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" plays on the soundtrack, and it's obvious that Smith intends to make the semi-romantic love connection clear. But why? It's not funny and the film only directly references the longing of the two leads in one brief moment (when Jay suggests that they have sex and get it over with). I think, if he wants to introduce the idea that Dante and Randal secretly want to fuck, he should have them fuck. Really. Why not? You brought up the idea, Kev, so let's have a little follow-through. To throw it out there and then back down immediately after you've spent 5 or 6 movies exploring it as a formal theme strikes me as cowardly.

Instead of a budding man-on-man love story, Smith spends the bulk of Clerks II exploring the nuances of Dante's once-again-complicated web of heterosexual relationships. He's become engaged to rich girl Emma (Schwalbach, Smith's wife) and plans to move with her to Florida to run her father's car wash. He's also become entangled with Becky (Rosario Dawson), the adorable tomboy who manages the Mooby's restaurant where he works. As in the first Clerks, when he was torn between the flighty but hot Caitlin and the committed but bossy Veronica, Dante must choose between maturing in an adult relationship with Emma or having fun with the girl he really and truly likes the best.



Putting Rosario Dawson in his movie was, hands down, the best decision Kevin made this time out. In the scene pictured above, Becky teaches an awkward Dante how to dance in anticipation of his wedding day. It's a really blatant, obvious way to get Rosario to move around and jiggle on camera, plus it lets Kevin revisit the "closing the store to hang out on the roof" idea from the first film.

But I'm not complaining. Dawson looks amazing in this scene. Unfortunately, it segues into an atrocious, pathetically half-assed "musical number" in which random extras show up and do kind of a Broadway softshoe to the Jackson 5. Oh, and we also get some random fat guy's buttcheeks sashaying around at a urinal in time to the music. Yikes.

The thing that irritates me the most about Smith is that he's been given this opportunity to make these films, and he doesn't really seem to try hard to improve as a filmmaker. He's got this extremely self-effacing thing instead. When challenged, he falls back on the fact that his movies are cheap, disposable entertainments that aren't designed to be brilliant visionary masterpieces. (In fact, the documentary on Disc 2 of the Clerks II DVD is titled "Back to the Well.")

I'm just not sure that admitting you're doing a half-assed job quite gets you off the hook. How many people could have taken the budget of Clerks II and churned out something far more worthwhile, something they really believed in rather than some lackadaisical trip back to the proverbial well? It's just a waste to keep making movies if your heart's not in it, and Kevin Smith's heart doesn't seem to be in this stuff any more. Even the crass sex jokes are phoned in this time around. The big "donkey show" joke that finishes out the movie is totally telescoped and obvious from the beginning of the film. I'll admit that Smith gets a few laughs out of the concept, but he also overplays his hand with the Jesus freak kid and ends the sequence on a grim, unfunny note, like an episode of "Ren and Stimpy" that morphs at the last second into "Wonder Showzen."

I kind of felt bummed out when the film was through. It's like a multimedia demonstration of the relentless passage of time, the tragedy of never being able to go back and recapture a fleeting moment from the past. Clerks, like the other highlights from that First Sundance Generation, has its place secured in pop culture history. But no amount of Roman numerals can resurrect that initial creative spark.