After Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Kevin Smith was ready to walk away from his Askewniverse and try something new. His next film was Jersey Girl, starring Ben Affleck as a recent widower who has to deal with raising his daughter alone after his wife (Jennifer Lopez) dies in childbirth. A new father at the time, this was clearly inspired by Smith’s own experiences with parenthood. As I was getting into Kevin Smith movies in high school, I watched this one too, and didn’t really care for it. From what I recall, it felt like a nondescript dramedy, with Smith’s unique hallmark writing touches either dulled or not present at all. It even ends with Affleck racing through traffic to get to his daughter’s school play, one of the biggest cliches in the book. The reaction to Jersey Girl upon release was not great. It barely grossed its budget (making it a bomb, considering marketing is typically double that), and critics were less than kind to it. Some of the blame for the general audience rejection of the film was laid on “Bennifer,” and the general public’s exhaustion of the endless media coverage of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s relationship. They only dated for two years, but it seemed like the two of them were absolutely everywhere at the time. A year prior, they starred in the infamous box office disaster Gigli, and finally officially split up after Jersey Girl finished shooting. Smith tried to reduce Lopez’s part in editing in response to Gigli‘s failure, but it seemed too late at that point. Affleck was also kind of in the doldrums through a good part of the 2000s, until revitalizing his career as a writer/director with the likes of Gone Baby Gone and The Town.
Most likely the deepest cut of all for Smith was reaction from his fan base to the film, who were largely not pleased. It seems understandable on the surface; while Smith was a husband and new father, a huge chunk of his fans were still younger teens and twenty-somethings, so a drama about having a kid was going to be a tough sell for them, let alone a PG-13 movie with very little of the stuff they loved from his previous works. Smith was in a tough position. He had “officially” concluded the Askewniverse, but returning to his fan-favorite characters seemed like a wise move. He had considered doing a Clerks sequel for a while, but what finally moved him was the “Snowball Effect” documentary about the making of Clerks, shot for the 10th anniversary deluxe DVD set, which came out around the same time as Jersey Girl. Shooting interview footage for the piece further emphasized to Smith just how much his premiere film meant to him, and enticed him to return to that world and continue Dante and Randal’s adventures. So from that, we got Clerks II, a sequel fans had been waiting for over a decade since the original. As for me, I don’t remember exactly when I first watched Clerks, but it couldn’t have been more than a year before the follow-up came out, and even in that short amount of time being a Smith fan, I was psyched. I remember liking both movies pretty equally, maybe even giving a slighter edge to Clerks II, but that might have just been from the novelty of it being a brand new movie. While mostly enjoyable in its own right, Clerks II unavoidably sits in the shadow of the original, ultimately feeling safer and more formulaic than its transgressive predecessor. Continue reading “ReView Askew: Clerks II (2006)”
