Would you like fries with that?
MOTW: Clerks II
Sans URGA this week, as I was busy last night... so I went to see Clerks II earlier in the day.
4WFR: Life, Love, Fandom, Bestiality
Twelve years ago, Kevin Smith released a cheap, black and white film, "Clerks", where Dante and Randal, working at the Quick Stop and RST Video spend a very long day talking about love, life, sex, Star Wars, and a lot of weird stuff also happens. Jay and Silent Bob hang out the front selling weed, and in the end, the characters have learned a little about themselves and their lives.
Now... not much has changed. Dante and Randal have been stuck working at the same stores... until the Quick Stop burns down, and they move to getting jobs at the fast food chain Mooby's. Joining them there are 19-year old coworker Elias and their boss Becky. Oh, and Jay and Silent Bob are out of rehab and in front of the store... still selling drugs. Dante's about to get married to Emma, and move to Florida, and this is his last day in New Jersey.
And as you would expect, a lot happens in one day. Lots of casual swearing, lots of talking about sex (deviant and regular), diatribes against Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars prequels, and a live action Transformers Movie (yes, it's true, one is coming... and unfortunately from my point of view, early reports are ruining my childhood memories). Once again, Dante is torn between two women - his fiance Emma and his boss Becky, and Randal just manages to dig the whole situation deeper when he hires Kinky Kelly and the Sexy Stud for Dante's going away party at the store.
The structure and plot of this film is similar to the first Clerks, and the character interactions almost the same. There's less of the Clerks insulting the customers (but they definitely do a lot to offend them) and J&SB are up to their usual tricks. The tension between Dante and Randal comes to a head at the climax of the movie, and feelings are spilled... and the resolution was incredibly fitting. The main difference is in the character's ages - Clerks was about the apathy of the early 20's, and Clerks II is about your early 30's and trying to get away from that apathy and actually do something with your life... because 33 is way too old to be flipping burgers.
Kevin Smith has actually produced a worthy sequel to Clerks (and its animated spin off), because he knows these characters well, and their neuroses and foibles allow for a lot of humorous situations to arise, and yet they both still have a lot of humanity and heart behind them. I was splitting my sides with laughter most of the way through this... and very little of that was in jokes (unusual for a Jersey movie), the majority of the humour comes through the current situation, and not through knowledge of Smith's other films.
Smith appears to have learned his lesson with "Jersey Girl" which wasn't well received by audiences (he even credits it in his thanks list for 'taking it in the ass so hard and never complaining') and shows that he still has that purile sense of humour that we love, coupled with the emotional core of his characters that we've seen before in, for example, "Chasing Amy".
9/10
Sans URGA this week, as I was busy last night... so I went to see Clerks II earlier in the day.
4WFR: Life, Love, Fandom, Bestiality
Twelve years ago, Kevin Smith released a cheap, black and white film, "Clerks", where Dante and Randal, working at the Quick Stop and RST Video spend a very long day talking about love, life, sex, Star Wars, and a lot of weird stuff also happens. Jay and Silent Bob hang out the front selling weed, and in the end, the characters have learned a little about themselves and their lives.
Now... not much has changed. Dante and Randal have been stuck working at the same stores... until the Quick Stop burns down, and they move to getting jobs at the fast food chain Mooby's. Joining them there are 19-year old coworker Elias and their boss Becky. Oh, and Jay and Silent Bob are out of rehab and in front of the store... still selling drugs. Dante's about to get married to Emma, and move to Florida, and this is his last day in New Jersey.
And as you would expect, a lot happens in one day. Lots of casual swearing, lots of talking about sex (deviant and regular), diatribes against Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars prequels, and a live action Transformers Movie (yes, it's true, one is coming... and unfortunately from my point of view, early reports are ruining my childhood memories). Once again, Dante is torn between two women - his fiance Emma and his boss Becky, and Randal just manages to dig the whole situation deeper when he hires Kinky Kelly and the Sexy Stud for Dante's going away party at the store.
The structure and plot of this film is similar to the first Clerks, and the character interactions almost the same. There's less of the Clerks insulting the customers (but they definitely do a lot to offend them) and J&SB are up to their usual tricks. The tension between Dante and Randal comes to a head at the climax of the movie, and feelings are spilled... and the resolution was incredibly fitting. The main difference is in the character's ages - Clerks was about the apathy of the early 20's, and Clerks II is about your early 30's and trying to get away from that apathy and actually do something with your life... because 33 is way too old to be flipping burgers.
Kevin Smith has actually produced a worthy sequel to Clerks (and its animated spin off), because he knows these characters well, and their neuroses and foibles allow for a lot of humorous situations to arise, and yet they both still have a lot of humanity and heart behind them. I was splitting my sides with laughter most of the way through this... and very little of that was in jokes (unusual for a Jersey movie), the majority of the humour comes through the current situation, and not through knowledge of Smith's other films.
Smith appears to have learned his lesson with "Jersey Girl" which wasn't well received by audiences (he even credits it in his thanks list for 'taking it in the ass so hard and never complaining') and shows that he still has that purile sense of humour that we love, coupled with the emotional core of his characters that we've seen before in, for example, "Chasing Amy".
9/10