In February of 2018, immediately after performing at a live event in Glendale, CA, Kevin Smith started to feel very unwell very quickly. It turns out he was suffering a massive heart attack, and was immediately shuttled to a hospital to clear a blockage from one of his arteries. He tweeted about it as soon as he could from his hospital bed (of course), learning that his medical issue was referred to as “the widow-maker” in how severe it is, and how slim one’s chances of recovery are. Smith had performed one of a scheduled three shows that night, and if he had carried on with the other two as planned and not received medical attention, he almost certainly would have died. It’s certainly an incredibly sobering event to go through, one that Smith really took to heart (so to speak…), re-evaluating his entire life up to that point, and how he would carry on after being given a second chance. He had already written a potential script for a third Clerks, but he ended up scrapping it in favor of a version more reflective of what had just happened to him and his new outlook on life, on looking back and looking forward. For better or worse, Clerks III became one of his most personal films, where the line between Kevin Smith and the characters he’s writing is blurred the furthest its ever gotten.

The other major origin for this film is “Clerks: Sell Out,” the unproduced Clerks: The Animated Series feature film, which would have featured Dante and Randal making a movie at the Quick Stop. I don’t know Smith ever started writing a script for it, but I can only imagine it would have contained a lot of the same behind-the-scenes jokes, cameos and callbacks that we also see in Clerks III, maybe in a more absurdist fashion, since it would’ve been based on the cartoon. If it had actually come out in the 2000s, a movie about the making of Clerks would have been kind of cute, almost like a companion piece to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, a double feature love letter by Kevin Smith to his original characters and the world he created over his first five films. But now in 2022, Smith has basically strip-mined every last bit of his filmography, his podcasts, even his own personal life to use as source material and joke fodder. Dante and Randal’s seemingly final outing becomes a celebration of Clerks, done by a filmmaker who literally has not stopped talking about Clerks since he made it almost thirty years ago. It’s a movie that feels both overbearingly somber and absolutely frivolous, trying so hard to be poignant and give its characters a final dramatic arc, but refuses to let them have any real growth since their entire existences are locked down to just the previous two movies. While Clerks II ended on a hopeful, though uncertain ambiguous note, Clerks III ends this epic trilogy with a blunt hammer swing to the face. Continue reading “ReView Askew: Clerks III (2022)” →

In the thirteen years since Clerks II, Kevin Smith’s career made a number of different turns, and to go over each of his ensuing films would be pretty exhaustive. I think the most influential event for him in that time was the birth of the SModcast, a podcast hosted by Smith and longtime producer and friend Scott Mosier, where they would basically talk for hours on end about whatever was on their minds. Its popularity would eventually lead to a series of different podcasts hosted by Smith, forming the SModcast podcast network. Now the man who could never stop himself from talking in interviews and live events had a brand-new outlet to gab on and on for multiple hours a week on various different shows he’d co-host with Mosier, Jason Mewes, his wife, Ralph Garman, and many others. Kevin Smith had built his career upon writing scripts filled with characters who were pretty much all versions of himself, communicating his likes, his dislikes, his theories, his profane thoughts, and so forth. Sure, there were stories and characters involved, but they were all basically vessels for Smith’s personal thoughts on things. But now he didn’t need to spend months making a multi-million dollar movie to broadcast his feelings on a certain subject. All he needed was a microphone, and he could record a podcast and release it that day to his legions of fans. Podcasting proved to be the perfect creative outlet for Smith to express himself, so what did he need to keep making movies for?

The 2010s is when Smith’s filmography starts to get weird, as he surprisingly started to dip into the horror genre. First was Red State, a movie Smith had been gestating for a while, and one I was very intrigued by: a thriller featuring antagonists based on the Westboro Baptist Church, the extremist religious hate group best known for picketing anywhere they’ll get media attention with their “God Hates Fags” signs. I remember being disappointed by the movie, but it’s been forever since I’ve seen it. As well as being a big departure for Smith thematically, Red State was also the first film he financed on his own, as he pretty much divorced himself from the major Hollywood system after this. Without needing to cater to a mass audience outside of his fans anymore, Smith could basically get away with whatever weird shit he wanted. Enter Tusk, a movie born entirely from a joke. The premise (a horror film about a man who gets turned into a walrus) started as a dumb bit Smith and Mosier came up with during an episode of SModcast, with Smith calling up his fans to tweet #WalrusYes if they wanted them to really make the movie. So, of course, his listeners happily endorsed him, and he actually went through it. Tusk, and its ensuing spin-off Yoga Hosers, were movies that acted as even bigger inside jokes than Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, as they were filled with easter eggs and references to Kevin Smith’s different podcasts, as Smith was more or less embracing that whatever he makes, he’s doing it for his already well-insulated fans who will understand and rejoice at any obscure callback he tosses them. This leads us to Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, an in-joke stuffed inside another in-joke, a movie made exclusively for the Kevin Smith faithful, even more so than Strike Back was. I saw this in theaters when it came out in a room filled with View Askew-heads, complete with a surprise appearance by Kevin Smith to introduce it, and the audience absolutely ate it up. It’s the absolute ideal setting to watch this movie in, as even though consciously I didn’t think it was very good, I still found the entire theater experience to be pretty positive. And after seeing it again, I’ll say that that was probably the only context you should watch this movie and not want to turn it off after the first half hour, if not earlier. Continue reading “ReView Askew: Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)” →