director/screenwriter
Kevin Smith
producers
Scott Mosier
Kevin Smith
cinematographer
David Klein
music
James L. Venable
editors
Scott Mosier
Kevin Smith
cast
Brian O'Halloran (Dante Hicks)
Jeff Anderson (Randal Graves)
Rosario Dawson (Becky)
Trevor Fehrman (Elias)
Jennifer Schwalbach (Emma)
Jason Mewes (Jay)
Kevin Smith (Silent Bob)
...and some cameos I'm not gonna spoil
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 97m
u.s.
release: 7/21/06
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other kevin
smith films
reviewed on this website:
- chasing
amy
- clerks
- dogma
- jay & silent bob strike back
- jersey girl
- mallrats
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Kevin Smith's Clerks II
is to his original Clerks
what Richard Linklater's Before
Sunset was to his original Before
Sunrise. Both sequels revisit the director's favorite
characters about a decade later, examining how life and the clock
have taken their toll. And both are ideally seen as bookend pieces,
to be watched one after the other. (Amusingly, the Smith/Linklater
analogy extends to the characters being animated in the interim
between films - Linklater's couple in a cameo in Waking
Life, Smith's counter jockeys in ABC's short-lived
Clerks cartoon.) In Linklater's world, people philosophize;
in Smith's world, people philosophize, with dick jokes.
Smith opens Clerks II
in grainy black-and-white, in winking emulation of the original's
(financially necessary) style. Dante (Brian O'Halloran) slouches
over to the Quick Stop convenience store for another day at work,
and finds it on fire. He and buddy Randal (Jeff Anderson), who
works at the adjoining video store, are now out of a job. So
they find themselves flipping burgers at Mooby's, the film's
cow-themed answer to McDonald's (which first reared its fattening
head in Smith's Dogma). After
a year of this, Dante is ready to move on, and finds his "golden
ticket" in Emma (Jennifer Schwalbach, Smith's wife), a well-meaning
but dull blonde who wants to whisk Dante away to Florida, where
he'll work at her father's car wash. It sounds like the soul-killing
fate worse than death endured by the men in Brokeback
Mountain, marrying into respectability at the
expense of what they actually want.
Randal, terrified of having
his friendship with Dante construed as gay, would take issue
with that comparison. But Clerks II gets at the heart
of (non-sexual) love between men at least as knowingly as the
Ang Lee film. Women like Emma seek to break that bond, whereas
women like Becky (Rosario Dawson), Dante's boss at Mooby's, at
least respect it even if they don't quite understand it. The
movie also brings back Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Smith
himself), heterosexual lifemates who don't seem to bother with
the opposite sex very much, though Jay boasts of his alleged
exploits loudly and often. In a key scene, Randal lets Dante
know how much he'll miss him when Dante moves away, and the moment
carries more punch than a comparable scene would between Dante
and a woman.
So far, Clerks II doesn't
sound like a lot of laughs. But there is raunchy fun to
be had here; the infamous "donkey show" scene that
Joel Siegel walked out on is wild without being particularly
explicit. And Randal has a new foil in a weirdly dorky Mooby's
employee, Elias (Trevor Fehrman), who worships Transformers
and Lord of the Rings with
a fervor that offends Randal's Star Wars-loving sensibilities.
If Clerks II has a flaw, it's that Dante and Randal don't
have enough screen time together -- but then, the very form of
the movie makes us feel Randal's gradual estrangement from Dante.
Before seeing the film, I read Kevin Smith's lengthy blog entries
about his struggles to get his friend Jason Mewes off drugs;
Smith's sadness at Mewes' growing away from him finds its way
indirectly into Clerks II. (Mewes has now been
clean for three years, and his reward was this film's revival
of Jay and Silent Bob, though Smith had earlier sworn that 2001's
Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back
was their swan song.)
How do you reconcile the desire
to be true to yourself with the desire to make something of yourself?
Clerks II strikes a balance, though with the unlikely
deus ex machina help of Jay and Silent Bob. (Which may
be Smith's way of saying that those two have been very, very
good to him.) The movie sort of ends up where the original Clerks
began, with a significant difference. Clerks II will resonate
with viewers in Smith's age range (mid-thirties) in a way that
goes beyond comedy, just as the first one did with twentysomethings.
It also, of course, finds time for obscene riffs on everything
from gay hobbits to The Silence of
the Lambs. It's clear by now that Smith is comfortable
in his Quick Stop and isn't in any hurry to burn it down.
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