Hey, all. Capone in Chicago here in what turns out to be a damn busy week
for movies.
You can choose to have your head explode by going to see LADY IN
THE WATER; or you can go see MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND and wish your head would
explode; or you can simply laugh until your head pops right off with this
little ditty...
It was a wise move on writer-director Kevin Smith's part to put the sexy and
lovely Rosario Dawson at the center of the otherwise all-male poster for
Clerks II. Although she doesn't get quite as much screen time as the boys,
she acts as the emotional core of this testosterone-laden follow up to
Smith's 1994 no-budget hit that, along with Pulp Fiction, set ablaze a new
wave of dialogue-heavy indies that painfully copied these two films without
really getting what made them so good.
With Clerks II, Smith revisits the
original film¹s two core characters--Jeff Anderson's flagrantly foul Randal
and Brian O'Halloran¹s eye-rolling counterpoint Dante--remembering what made
this duo so hilarious but also acknowledging that the two are fast
approaching their mid-30s.
Framed in an outrageous deluge of bad language,
wildly taboo conversations, and wonderfully disgusting situations, Smith
asks questions about responsibility, growing up, starting a family, and
plain and simply acting your age. Needless to say, this last point is the
hardest for these two to embrace.
The film opens with Dante arriving at work at the same convenience store he
and Randal have been working in for 10 years. He opens the security gate to
find the place is ablaze. Jump ahead one year, the pair are now working at
the McDonald's-like fast food joint Mooby's. (Fans of all of Smith's other
films will find this name--and many other things about the film--comfortably
familiar.)
Now, instead of insulting customers and intellectualizing about Star Wars at
a Quik Stop, they do so in the company of other employees slinging burgers
and fries. The two welcome additions to the Smith family are the
aforementioned Dawson as the sweet Mooby's manager Becky, who engages in
what appears to be an innocent flirtation with Dante; and relative newcomer
Trevor Fehrman as the Lord of the Rings-obsessed virgin Elias.
Dante is now
engaged to the Emma (Smith's real-life wife Jennifer Schwalbach), who, 10
years earlier, would have been way out of his league. Having played the
field with a succession of good-looking men, she has no settled on a guy she
believes will try a little harder. The film follows Dante's final 24 hours
in New Jersey before uprooting himself to Florida, where Emma's parents live
and where they¹ll be married.
Also returning from Clerks (and from nearly all of Smith's films) are Jay
and Silent Bob, played by Jason Mewes and Smith. The very existence of this
film has a lot to do with a promise Smith made to Mewes about re-examining
their characters one more time on film (after apparently shutting down the
franchise with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) if he kicked his drug habit.
The pair are still drug dealers and they have relocated to outside Mooby's,
but Smith now includes a few choice comments about rehab into his script.
Smith seems to instill a fierce loyalty among his actors, as is evidenced by
cameos from the likes of Ben Affleck, as well as Jason Lee and Ethan Suplee
(both of "My Name Is Earl"), and there¹s something so reassuring to see so
many familiar faces.
As with all of Smith's films, the jokes range from the gut-bustingly funny
to the sound of crickets. Seriously, how many times can the line "Shut the
fuck up" make you laugh? But Smith's observations about everything from the
prospects of a Transformers movie to religion to "inter-species erotica" to
trolls protecting the chastity of young women by hiding in their orifices
are the stuff of legend.
And naturally the ongoing battle about which
trilogy is the best (Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings), well that just
never gets old. Beware all LOTR fans: Randal's one-minute reenactment of
that sacred trilogy, as well as his take on racial slurs, is as sharp and
cutting edge as anything Smith has ever written.
But the scenes that surprised me the most were the less outrageous. There
are some genuinely sweet moments in this film that are in no way indicative
of Smith growing soft in his old age. Instead, they show that he has gained
just enough maturity, sensitivity, and knowledge (as well as a wife and
child) in the last 12 years to make us care about these characters and not
just laugh at/with them. Of course, he's also smart enough to realize that
there isn't a red-blooded American male who won't be won over by Dawson's
bouncy dance on the roof of Mooby's to the Jackson 5's "ABC" while trying to
teach Dante to dance at his wedding.
Let's face it. You either love Smith's work or you never quite liked him (at
least not past the first Clerks). I fall squarely in the first category;
hell, I even like Jersey Girl. And this film is a worthy successor to a
modern classic and well worth checking out. Clerks II is loaded with equal
parts charm and rude (but damn funny) antics. Perhaps for the first time in
his career, Smith has given us something for everyone, without going too
much in any direction. The film manages to give us romance and
vomit-inducing acts, sometime simultaneously.
What more could you want?
Capone
