I’ve been re-exploring some of Kevin Smith’s work (the director/screenplay writer/comics author) and I have come to the conclusion that he started out very strong (perhaps at his peak) then he did some good stuff in his middle period, but recently he has lost most of his cinematic and writing mojo.
Except for Mallrats, Smith was terrific in the 90’s. He captured the flavor and essence of the grunge era and comics “geek” culture better than anyone else. Along with Richard Linklater (who ended up being an even better and more consistent director than Smith) these two film makers captured slacker lingo and culture in movies perfectly.
Smith created the whole wacky and wonderful View Askew characters and universe which was somewhat based on real people and places in Smith’s native New Jersey. He has mined this material over and over in both his films and comics.
Unfortunately later film makers in the mumble core movement emulated Smith’s and Linklater’s penchants/ habits of putting in long conversations about trivial things with obscure cultural references and pushed it too far resulting in a fair amount of cinematic excrement. Still there were a few terrific films with Mumblecore elements such as Jeff Who Lives at Home.
The first work of Kevin Smith’s I saw was Chasing Amy. The movie is important to me because it was the first film I reviewed for The Star newspapers. I saw the criterion edition on sale the other day for less than five bucks and I picked it up. It holds up rather well. The dialogue is still snappy, the situations are interesting plus Smith captures the comic book convention milieu quite well. I never went to one of the big mainstream comic conventions but I went to CAKE the last few years, a fun alternative comics fest in Chicago (see http://cakechicago.com/) which was held in the middle of Boy’s Town.
I once I had a debate with another film reviewer when I wrote reviews for The Star newspapers, Terry Loncaric (her work was always engaging and well thought out and she also once took me to a lesbian bar which was pretty cool). As I recall she liked the film less than I did because she thought that a lesbian would not change her sexual preference so quickly and completely over one guy, but I thought the title character was just bisexual. Later on a woman I knew (I think her name was Dawn) who was attracted to both men and women told me that she does not believe in sexual preference labels because people just love who they love.
I don’t pretend to be an authority on sexual orientation, but I think that there are more people than we know in society that can go either way (in an old song by the glam band The Sweet this was called AC/DC.)
There is a current presidential candidate named Tara Indiana (I don’t think she will be in the debates) who is a dominatrix. See http://www.gq.com/story/tara-indiana-dominatrix-president-trump-penis.
Part of her platform is that she wants to make S & M a sexual preference. In a recent interview with Alan Combs she said she thought that people are born with a proclivity for it and environment is the trigger.
I also greatly admired the comic book trade paperback Quiver which reprints Kevin Smith’s first run of issues of Green Arrow. The issues are thoughtful; the dialogue is hilarious; and I don’t remember anyone else (except for maybe Grant Morrison and Mark Waid) who handled the interactions of the JLA characters so well (I don’t regularly read the series though). The series also introduced a new sidekick for the archer, Speedy (her “real” name was Mia) who was kind of like Green Arrrow’s Robin. Mia was a young ex hooker who later became a superhero and later she found out she was HIV positive (the first Speedy in the classic Denny O’Neil/Neil Adams run was a heroin addict).
Of course I also loved Smith’s work on the Daredevil comics with Joe Quesada in 1999, his Bluntman and Chronic comics (they are like a pot smoking Batman and Robin) and most of his early films (Clerks, Clerks 2, and most of Dogma and Silent Bob and Jay Strike Back.)
The Daredevil comics and the Dogma film are the works which most exhibit Smith’s Roman Catholic heritage (in Dogma he parodies the gospel and the religion but only a person who came up Catholic could have come up with that script and I think in a weird way it reinforces Catholicism. Dogma retells the Christ story in a humorous and irreverent and occasionally tasteless manner. His Daredevil run involved a baby who may or not be the anti-Christ, and the main hero was conflicted about what to do because of his Catholic beliefs.
Smith also did a fair amount of comic work in the 2000’s but he recently lost some of his momentum and prestige in the field. His work has become more inconsistent and after numerous time delays due to cinema commitments many fans just stopped caring.
He returned to his View Askew characters that were introduced in the films in his creative, lively, humorous and sometimes crude Oni press and Image comics. His miniseries Chasing Dogma told what happened between Jay and Silent Bob between the films For Chasing Amy and Dogma. In that period Smith won the prestigious Harvey Award, for Best New Talent in comic books.
Smith returned to Marvel for two mini-series that were disappointing: Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do and Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target, both of which were issued in 2002.
The Black Cat series was six issues long and gorgeously rendered but after the third issue was published two months after the initially scheduled release date; the final issues were delayed for at least three years. Smith produced too little too late. The Target was never finished; only one issue came out.
For DC Smith wrote Batman: Cacophony, with art by friend Walt Flanagan, which ran from November 2008 to January 2009. The trade paperback of Batman: Cacophony became a New York Times Bestseller in their Hardcover Graphic Books section, but I don’t remember it that well so it could not have been that special. In 2010 Smith wrote a six-issue Batman mini-series called The Widening Gyre for DC drawn by Walt Flanagan. The series was initially planned as 12 issues but it was never completed.
I greatly enjoyed the Askew universe based films Smith did in the 2000’s: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and Clerks II (2006). Rosario Dawson gave one of her most winning performances in Clerk II and she looks fantastic too. But I don’t know how long he can keep using some of these characters. It would be kind of pathetic to see a 50 something version of Silent Bob and Jay still hanging out on the corners with their weed bags.
Of course along with the rest of the sane world, I completely despised Jersey Girl (2006) in which Smith gave up all his signature cinematic idiosyncrasies that made him unique in order to make an anonymous big budget piece of shit/star vehicle. Incidentally it bombed despite the then high profile of its stars, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. When was the last time you saw a good movie starring Jennifer Lopez besides Selina (ok I admit I actually liked her in Oliver Stone’s U-Turn and I liked the film too.)? The Jersey Girl budget was $35 million, and it earned only $36 million.
This film was supposed to launch Smith as a successful director of big budget films but it did so poorly that they cancelled his proposed Green Hornet film (he made his story into a comic series and someone else did the movie years later.) Despite this setback I think Smith might be able to make a great big budget comic based film.
I just saw his film Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) for the second time, and it pretty much reinforced my original opinion. Although it did not quite deserve to be a total critical and financial bomb, it is not particularly satisfying. It’s not nearly as funny, tender or sexy as it needed to be. Buried beneath all the dick jokes and sex scenes are a tender if predictable little love story (between the title characters) and this is the part of the film that works best. Of course everyone in the film figures out that Zack and Miri are in love before they do or there would not be a movie.
I wanted to watch the film again because I really like the female lead. Elizabeth Banks (Seth Rogan is ok in it too). She did not make a big splash or impression on me in Zach and Miri, but she later went on to do far better work in Love and Mercy, (last year’s terrific biopic about the Beach Boy, Brian Wilson) as well as the classic cult horror/sci-fi film Slither.
She was tremendously appealing in Love and Mercy, and she should have gotten an Oscar nomination for her performance. Of course last year was a great year for female performances but unbeknownst to the Oscar voters half of them were by French actresses
Believe it or not I originally viewed Zack and Miri because the quack and psydeu psychologist Dr. Laura responded to a letter from a teacher who ranted and raved against the film without ever seeing it. Of course Dr. Laura used this as an excuse to lambast the film and blame it and the media for high teen birth rates. See this link:
http://www.drlaura.com/blog?action=viewBlog&blogID=553&dest=/pg/jsp/community/printblog.jspaw
Although Zack and Miri (as it has been retitled on some DVDs) are somewhat flaccid and routine I found it far less offensive than some of Dr. Laura’s shows and comments. Remember this is the woman who referred to lesbians and gays as “biological mistakes,” and she used the N word about a thousand times on one of her radio shows (ok I’m exaggerating) when a black caller complained about her white husband’s friends off color jokes. She seemed to sympathize with the crude racist joke tellers but not the caller.
The last Kevin Smith film I saw was Tusk (2014) . It was an extremely original but disgusting dark comedy/horror flick about a man who holds a podcaster captive (incidentally Smith is also a podcaster) and surgically turns him into a human walrus. I will never enjoy the Tusk song from Fleetwood Mac as much after seeing this film (they used it in this film, but American Horror Story used it better.) This was one of the few films I ever saw that literally made me want to vomit. But it’s a little better than Human Centipede.
I missed some of the Kevin Smith films from the last five years such as Cop Out (2010), Red State (2011), Holidays (2016) and Yoga Hosers (2016), but I’m not sure that I am going to go out of my way to seek them out. Late period Kevin Smith films have been even more hit and miss than late period Woody Allen films (although I admit Matchpoint and Midnight in Paris were quite wonderful.)
Smith has also discussed doing a sequel to Mall Rats as well as Clerks III. At the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con Smith reveled he has written a film called Moose Jaws, which he described as “Jaws, with a moose”, which will be the third and final film in his True North trilogy. I think I might pass on that one.
