Last night, i got excited by the idea of Clerks II. Then, i thought back and realized that Smith movies have been mediocre outside of Clerks and Chasing Amy.

Here's the link of a good rant:

am i allowed to just cut and paste the whole article? well, considering 3 people read this, i think i'm safe.

Has anyone else noticed that Kevin Smith’s movies are horrible, or wondered how it is that he’s still working?

Editor's Note - While I personally do not share this view, and Kevin Smith is actually a "friend" of EM. I thought Michael's comments were pretty valid. Check out our Exclusive interview with K.S. HERE! .

Ten years after debuting with “Clerks,” Smith seems poised to cross over from indie demigod to brand name Hollywood director. He has vowed to retire his “View Askew” alternate universe, and, with it, all of the recurring characters played by his cronies.

Smith has colluded with the Jennifer Lopez juggernaut for his upcoming movie, “Jersey Girl,” and his follow-up project will be a prequel to the Chevy Chase “Fletch” movies. Smith has also apparently reached the level, as both an auteur and as a pop cultural phenomenon, to warrant a vanity lecture DVD (“An Evening with Kevin Smith”).

As someone who has regarded his work rather dubiously for some time now, this is all a bit hard to fathom, and it seems to me that now, more than ever, the above questions beg to be addressed.
Don’t get me wrong. Like everyone else, I reserve warm and fuzzy feelings for “Clerks.” Back in ’94, who wasn’t rooting for Kevin Smith?

Who was not behind this poor would-be Woody Allen schlub from New Jersey who ran up massive credit card debts in creating that heartfelt black and white ####box of an independent film? Who did not forgive the stilted dialogue or the high school-grade acting in light of the good vibes that “Clerks” emanated, and the well-publicized background story of Smith’s struggle to get his movie made?
And what about Jason Mewes (the vocal half of the ‘Jay and Silent Bob” duo)? Wasn’t it funny how totally unimpressed this guy seemed to be by appearing in a movie? Would anyone in Hollywood have had the balls to actually cast the pot dealer who hung out in front of their neighborhood Mini-Mart in the role of the pot dealer who hangs out in front of the Mini-Mart?

Nobody liked “Clerks” more than me. I’m from New Jersey. It really is like that. And the unique profanity and banality indigenous to Jersey had waited too long to be flayed and served up on the screen.

Seizing his moment, Smith apparently reasoned that if you are to be the filmmaker laureate of New Jersey, you need to make a movie based in a mall. So, buoyed by the success of “Clerks,” a real budget, and the stuntcasting of Shannen Doherty (at that point a Hollywood untouchable), Smith followed up “Clerks” with “Mallrats.”
“Mallrats” is one of the worst films ever made. Again: I am from New Jersey. I know malls. When I was ten years old, I saw Tiffany lip-synch “I Think We’re Alone Now” at Garden State Plaza. I am the target audience.

But neither money nor Shannon Doherty could fix the myriad problems that had plagued “Clerks.” Due to the fevered pace and high volume at which much of the script of “Mallrats” is delivered, the dialogue in is actually more awkward than it was in Smith’s first movie. Witness Doherty attempting to roar through the following line: “I’m a girl, dammit! I want to do girly things! Like fix up someone’s hair and get phone calls expressing romantic sentiments!” Try spitting that one out by yourself, right now. Shannen Doherty couldn’t do it, I can’t do it, and you probably can’t either.

Throughout his career, Smith has been incapable of advancing a plot by artful or even workmanlike means. He relies heavily on conversations in which one character acts a voice of reason, breaking down a situation for the main character, and then leading him, by the nose, to enlightenment. Silent Bob is Smith’s favorite voice of reason.

In “Mallrats,” a quote from Yoda provides his token bon mots. Comic book legend Stan Lee serves as the second voice of reason, drawing parallels between Jason Lee’s problems and those of Marvel Superheroes. In yet another bit of stuntcasting, Terry from “Three’s Company” appears as the third voice of reason, playing a topless psychic with three nipples.

However, despite the presence of these and other quasi-intellectual (and quasi-intelligent) monologues, Smith’s movies are essentially nothing more than warmed over artifacts of Grade-B 1980’s cinema (witness the tri-nippled clairvoyant). No character in “Mallrats” illustrates this point more perfectly than the sadistic producer of the “Dating Game” knock-off on which the flimsy plot turns. The stock blowhard’s most notable scene involves greedily consuming pretzels which are covered with fecal matter. And let us not forget the fat guy who is obsessed with the Magic Eye, a subplot that might well have been edited out of something from Troma.

I have no problem with cheekiness, cheap laughs, or the 80’s, but one never gets the sense that Smith is trying to be self-consciously, tongue in cheek, faux ####ty. This is not John Waters. This is not Jack White letting Meg White play drums in the White Stripes. This is really the best that Kevin Smith can do.

Smith followed up “Mallrats” with his commercial breakthrough, “Chasing Amy,” the story of one Jersey’s man’s adventure in mid-90’s bisexual trendspotting. Although the movie has dated poorly, it nonetheless remains better than everything else Smith has done. He still needs three voices of reason (Jay, Silent Bob, and the gay black comic book writer) to keep his story rolling, not to mention a ham-fisted musical montage to show how and why Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams fall in love, but Adams has a winning screen personality (where did she disappear to, anyway?), and, at this point, Smith had made the novel discovery that awkward dialogue can be made less of a sore thumb if one or both of the characters is eating something while they’re talking. Indeed, a little peanut butter to gum up the pronunciation leaves the gutter Voltaire a little less naked as Ben Affleck spits it out.

Unfortunately, following that successful and critically acclaimed film, Smith opted to make his “difficult” film, and courted controversy with “Dogma.” As if often the case with controversial pop art, the film’s subversive nature only runs skin deep. On the “Evening” DVD, Smith names the Catholic ban on premarital sex as his main objection to Christian dogma. In his own words, his problem with the Catholic Church began when he was young, and realized, “I wanna #### before I get married.” Obviously, libraries are filled with books containing sophisticated attacks on God, faith, and Christianity, but nobody pickets libraries. That’s because you don’t anger the most irascible elements of the religious community by actually challenging religion; you do it by fashioning an image of Jesus’s mom with an elephant turd, and showing your work in a city run by Rudy Giuliani. Or by making a movie in which George Carlin plays a cardinal, Alanis Morrisette plays God, and a black man (Chris Rock) plays an apostle.

Now that the stink surrounding “Dogma” has gone away, the most offensive aspect of the film, the one which escaped criticism from both the political right wing and the Church, becomes increasingly clear: It is excruciatingly boring. I fell asleep the first time I watched “Dogma,” and it was chore to keep focused on the film during a more recent viewing. Unfortunately, a #### Monster and an unusually healthy serving of Jason Mewes don’t do much to help.

Following “Dogma,” Smith laid all his cards on the table, and finally let Mewes run rampant throughout his very own vehicle, “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.” The good news about “Jay and Silent Bob” is that Smith’s ability as a visual stylist is finally up to snuff with that of your average hack director. The bad news is that, despite several very funny moments, getting Mewes all of that screen time means fleshing the Jay character out to three very unflattering dimensions.

The film suffers in the same way that many SNL movies suffer; Jay is a one-note, one-joke character, and even good one-joke characters (The Ladies Man, for example) often wilt under more elaborate characterization.

Which, incidentally, is not to say that Jay is not a superb character. Like Beavis and Butthead or Eric Cartman, he has an amazing ability to do the same thing over and over again and make it funny every time. I think it is fair to say that we wouldn’t even be talking about Smith right now if he had never befriended Jason Mewes.

Speaking of Mewes: How great is it that, despite his popularity, and the fact that he plays Kevin Smith’s only dependable recurring character, Mewes seemingly has no interest in seriously pursuing a film career, outside of playing “Jay”? Consider the fact that Jason Lee was never even half as entertaining as Mewes in “Mallrats” or “Chasing Amy,” yet he has already gone so Hollywood that he’s made a chick movie with Julia Stiles, and joined the Church of Scientology.

Anyway, back to Kevin Smith:

Having put the “View Askew” world to bed for good, Smith apparently got tired of waiting for James Lipton to invite him over for a chat, so he took it upon himself to release “An Evening with Kevin Smith,” culled from footage of the director on the lecture circuit back in 2001.

The first thing one notices about the DVD (other than the “Snoogans” knit cap and the other View Askew memorabilia being hawked in the accompanying merch catalog), is the level of adoration that Smith enjoys from his fans. Outside of each of the five colleges at which Smith spoke (college students apparently comprise the bulk of his fans), we are treated to views of assorted geeks and spazzes singing Smith’s praises and parroting their favorite Smith catchphrases for the camera.

The love-in continues on a more massive scale once the cameras move inside the various auditoriums. For the first hour or so, we actually spend more time hearing about how great Kevin Smith is from his fans than hearing Smith himself speak.

I highly recommend that you skip this thing, so allow me to save you the trouble by summarizing the major points: (1) Apparently, Prince is very, very weird - like Michael Jackson without the child molestation. If you are one of those people who are waiting for Prince to turn the corner and start making good music again, it seems like you should just let that dream go. (2) The homoerotic strain of Smith’s movies extends to Smith’s personal life. One cannot escape the suspicion that all of those gay jokes involving Jay and Silent Bob are based, at least in part, on Smith’s real life obsession with Jason Mewes. I know that sounds far-fetched (not to mention slanderous), but at one point, Smith grinds his hips to mime what a Jay and Silent Bob porno flick might look like, and another time, he talks about the time he got his hands on a homemade sex tape featuring Mewes, stating his desire to “see this man in action.” (There is also – I #### you not – a set of bookends currently available for purchase which depict Jay sexually penetrating Silent Bob.)

Mewes turned up for one of the lectures, and watching him is easily the most intriguing part of “Evening.” The only remotely complete thought he utters refers to heroin, and, given his string of drug arrests, as well as how much time he spends scratching himself while on stage, it seems highly probable that he was high during his appearance. (F.Y.I: Heroin makes you itchy.) However, Smith is more than comfortable talking in Mewes’ stead. He even offers a long-winded etymology of the word “Snoogans” on Mewes behalf while Mewes gazes on.

Eventually (and I do mean eventually – the DVD is four hours long), Smith gets down to talking shop. Speaking of his motivation for making “Dogma,” he jokes, “There can be no better explanation or proof of the existence of God than the fact that I have a film career.” This is obviously self-deprecation to some degree or another, but the theory is as good as any for explaining his continuing popularity.

Though there is something to make you laugh in each of Kevin Smith’s films (usually Mewes), he has no visual style to speak of, and very little cinematic flair in any sense. The movies really just lay there.

And yet there is no denying the existence of a fan base. I guess some people like to be able to get both dick and fart jokes and psychobabble all at the same time. Smith himself has described “Mallrats” as a “smart Porky’s.”

Personally, for sophomoric humor, I’ll take the original “Porky’s.” And for smart, well, I’d prefer to endure a one-act play by an NYU undergrad.
The best thing that can be said about Smith, going all the way back to “Clerks,” is that he is a people pleaser. When we liked Jay and Silent Bob, he gave us more Jay and Silent Bob. When we were into slutty bisexual women, he gave us a slutty bisexual woman.

But I still can’t see how J-Lo’s of the world will grapple with his cumbersome dialogue, or how the characters they portray will be able to find their way in the world without Silent Bob or Stan Lee there to guide them. From here on out, Kevin Smith no longer dwells in the View Askew universe. We shall see what kind of home he makes for himself in Hollywood.