Why is Kevin Smith still alive?
What malevolent forces have conspired to keep Kevin Smith around forever?
It’s crazy to think that there was a time when Kevin Smith could be mentioned in the same breath as Tarantino and Linklater, but there was. It happened! Robert Rodriguez was in that conversation too, and while the implications of the director of fucking Sharkboy and Lavagirl being compared to the director of Before Sunset is insane to begin with, it just doesn’t compare, because I do at least still think Robert Rodriguez is a “filmmaker.” He makes “films.” I don’t know what the fuck it is you can say that Kevin Smith makes.
Would Clerks have gained acclaim if it wasn’t shot in black and white? Honest question. It’s easy to mistake it at first for a Dogme film—and Smith later made a… something called Dogma—only with piss-poor writing, acting, and camera-work. Maybe that’s what tricked people. Maybe people just wanted a Lars Von Trier who didn’t fuck.
The film cost around $28k. That’s nearly $60k in today’s money. USD. That’s over $80k CAD. I had a friend who actually knows how to make films vociferously argue that that budget makes sense—does it? The actors are obviously non-professional. The location was free. He edited the thing himself with his friend. I hear the camera he was working with requires some serious work with the lighting, and those cameras don’t come cheap but… $80k CAD? Really? I get that the camera was probably expensive, but he rented it. I don’t know, man, that sounds like a lot. Hold on, let me just look this up for a second.
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Okay so his breakdown of the budget looks like it might actually make sense to me I guess, I’m a moron as usual and don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. Probably could have saved a lot of money by just getting a Super 8, because it’d frankly look just as good as what he wound up putting out. The man went into like $20k of credit card debt. For this film. For a film that looks and sounds and reads aloud like fucking Clerks. Like shelling out to take a first-class plane ticket with all the trimmings to Regina. Why go to Regina in the first place?
Nobody in Clerks went anywhere aside from just more shitty Kevin Smith films, although Jason Mewes nearly went to prison or possibly the morgue. Compare Smith’s homegrown “stars” to the equivalents in, say, John Waters’ rotation. Divine is a household fucking name. Mink Stole has been in a number of great films. Maelcum Soul actually OD’d and died, unlike Mewes, the fucking quitter.
Anything remotely interesting about Clerks is either confirmably unintentional or probably so. The store having its blinds closed was just a smart workaround for the fact that Smith had to film after closing the store he worked at at night, and somehow it became one of the film’s only potent images both aesthetically and thematically. The duality between Dante and Randall and their bigger burnout doppelgangers Jay and Silent Bob provides an nearly interesting “through the looking glass” view at relative circles of go-nowhere misery, but in all likelihood it’s just that Smith simply doesn’t have any other ideas and these are the only characters he knows how to write and so he wrote them twice in the same movie. Mallrats is about two burnout friends with arrested development who bum around. Chasing Amy is about two burnout friends with arrested development who bum around.1 Dogma is about… two burnout angels who bum around. The added twists is each movie features a wise-cracking Cool Girl to be pursued or evaded or just help out. Zack and Miri Make a Porno broke the mould by having the Cool Girl be one of the two burnout friends with arrested development and Cop Out is a movie I haven’t seen but looks to be a dysfunctional buddy cop movie and I think I can fill in the blanks from there. He has a movie out this month called The 4:30 Movie that looks to be about four friends but I worry that might be biting off more than he can chew, it’s so ambitious by his standards that I feel as though the making-of could resemble the plot of 8½.
Do you know what Kevin Smith did recently? He released a movie as an NFT. No, really. I can’t even comprehend how fucking stupid that is. Why is he still alive? The only person with a more perplexing longevity is M. Night Shyamalan. When Alan Dershowitz was fighting the MPAA on Miramax’s behalf to get Clerks a lowered R-rating, did he accidentally peek into Dersh’s briefcase and see a severed child head that Alan was bringing home from Little St. James as a leftover? How else could someone’s career survive Jersey Girl, Red State, AND Tusk. Surely there’s easier ways to launder money than sitting through a producers’ meeting where Kevin Smith talks to you about Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Yes, they’re “successful” comic book guys but it’s still basically bumming around, let’s be real.