As Clerks became a quiet hit at festivals, Kevin Smith had a golden opportunity to pitch a new project to interested studios. He basically sold the idea of Mallrats as “Clerks but in a mall,” which was a pretty smart angle to take for his next film. You want to give interested producers more of what they responded to the first time around, but on top of that, this was Smith’s chance to take what he did with Clerks and reshape it for a wider audience. Since Clerks only played to a small amount of theaters, a lot of people seeing Mallrats likely wouldn’t be familiar with it, so Smith was free to create a sort of spiritual successor to Clerks. Continuing the creative mindset of writing what you know, Smith jumped from the Quick Stop to the mall, the other major hotspot for his Jersey friends. With big studio resources behind him, Mallrats would be his chance to bring his unique voice to a mainstream comedy, but unfortunately, the film kind of ends up feeling like Kevin Smith making a regular dumb mainstream comedy.

Along with Chasing Amy, I only watched Mallrats once back in high school, and even at that sophomoric young age, I didn’t find much appealing about it. And rewatching it now, I completely see why. Mallrats feels like a big studio comedy version of Clerks, but in all the worst ways, with the tone, the humor, and the soul of Smith’s premier film reduced to its most superficial forms, leaving us with a cast of uninspired caricatures, slapstick and scatalogical humor, and a supreme lack of a meaningful narrative. It honestly feels more like someone cynically trying to make a Clerks-esque comedy than a film made by Kevin Smith himself. Following a critical examination of the listlessness of young adulthood and the inner turmoil inherent within comes a movie that’s an unabashed celebration of being a shitty, selfish, and juvenile overgrown teenager. I imagine that demographic probably ate this film up for that very reason (and they did, as Mallrats became a cult classic on video), but watching it now as an adult in 2022, I find it really difficult to see how anyone without nostalgia blinders could get a kick out of this. Continue reading “ReView Askew: Mallrats (1995)” →

Filmmakers always put a little bit of themselves into their work. Why else create something if you’re not drawing from your own emotions, your own experiences, your point-of-view on the world? Even the biggest blockbusters, the successful ones anyway, have at least a little nugget of human truth to them, a specific voice by someone with something to say. Kevin Smith is an extremely clear example of this, as his movies, for better or worse, are populated with characters who represent himself, speaking from his perspective. The bedrock of this, of course, is Clerks, a movie he wrote and shot when he was 22 years old working at a convenience store… about a 22-year-old who works at a convenience store.

If you mention Kevin Smith to anybody on the planet, the first word out of their mouth would be Clerks. Almost thirty years later and it’s still Smith’s most identifiable calling card, one that he’s most certainly embraced. There’s definitely a sweetness to the respect he holds to his seminal film, acknowledging how it made his career and never losing sight of that fact. But then he’s made many a joke over the years about how he never really progressed past Clerks and it’s all downhill from there, almost to the point that it feels like a defense mechanism for him. But forget all that, let’s just focus in on just the movie by itself, this little indie darling made by some kid on a shoestring budget about a bunch of slacker twenty-somethings yakking about Star Wars and cursing about the jobs they hate. Continue reading “ReView Askew: Clerks (1994)” →

I think I first stumbled upon Clerks working at the library while I was in high school, and I became glued into the world of Kevin Smith pretty quickly after that. The nonstop pop-culture-laced banter, the boldly risqué humor, the snarky attitude… his filmography was prime fodder for a sarcastic 16-year-old kid to latch onto. But even beyond the films, Kevin Smith is an entertainment draw within himself. Starting with his message board and blogs, then his Q&A DVD specials, and now with his ten thousand different podcasts, the man has been talking our ears off for decades now with his thoughts on movies, behind-the-scenes industry stories, and how his wife’s genitals still pwn his dick after all these years. He’s kind of a polarizing figure, both as a filmmaker and a public personality, in that there seem to be two vocal camps that either love or hate him. Even though I don’t love all his movies (some of them I pretty much hate), I find it impossible to not kind of like the guy. He’s an affable stage presence, and throughout his career, he’s always seemed relatively down-to-earth, free of any sort of pretension about who he is. And despite any feelings I have over the trajectory of his filmography, I feel like I have to give him a bit of a pass thanks to the strong nostalgia I have over his first collection of movies, dubbed the View Askewniverse.

The View Askewniverse was the name given to Smith’s original five films, as they all took place within the same canonical timeline in or around New Jersey, with interconnected characters being referenced or appearing throughout, the most prominent of which being those wacky weed dealers Jay and Silent Bob. Seemingly inspired by Smith’s love of comics and the ongoing continuity within, I guess that kind of also makes him a film world forefather to the MCU and all the other failed studio attempts to make cohesive cinematic universes. After Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Smith would leave his world behind to create other movies, but ended up circling back to his original characters for three more films in the twenty-one years since. Unlike a lot of his later work, these movies feel more personally connected to Smith, inspired by where he was or what was occupying his mind while making them. Clerks of course was filmed at the convenience store Smith worked in, with him speaking through the main characters about how much their jobs suck and how they wanted more out of life but didn’t quite know what, while Dogma is his attempt to grapple with his complicated feelings on being raised Catholic. His two latest returns to his original playground are easily his most autobiographical, with him musing openly about fatherhood, his own near-death experience, and looking back over his life and career as a whole.

Clerks III just finished its limited theatrical run, and Smith is currently on tour across the country showing the film and doing a Q&A afterward, as he’s done with his last couple movies. I’m reminded how excited I was to see Clerks II in the theater sixteen years ago (obligatory “I feel fucking old” comment here), and while I’m certainly nowhere near as excited about the third installment (evidenced by me passing on seeing it in the theater), I’m still at least a little interested in seeing Dante and Randal again, and how this “saga” is going to conclude. Smith’s filmography has gone through a lot of different twists and turns between these two movies, which is possibly fodder for an entirely different series of reviews (although I don’t know if I have the strength in me to actually watch Yoga Hosers…), but I thought it would be interesting to revisit the View Askewniverse movies and see how they fare after all these years, many of which I haven’t seen in a long time, and some I’ve only seen once back in high school. So every Thursday, I’ll be analyzing a new View Askew film (and one TV series) leading up to Clerks III, which I am banking on getting a December digital release so I can cover it before the year’s over. So will my nostalgia fuel continue to take hold, or will these movies suck 37 dicks? In a row? I guess we’ll find out.

October 6: Clerks (1994)
October 13: Mallrats (1995)
October 20: Chasing Amy (1997)
October 27: Dogma (1999)
November 3: Clerks: The Animated Series (2000)
November 10: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)
November 17: Clerks II (2006)
December 1: Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)
December ??: Clerks III (2022)