Clerks III (2022)

Rated R for all of the language and sexual content, despite not actually showing any of it on screen.  If Kevin Smith is known for drug and sex jokes, this is more of that.  Honestly, this MPAA section is only for those who haven't heard of Kevin Smith.  Not an insult, but I know that time passes.  There's vulgarity and a heavy amount of blasphemy throughout, but his goal is to be sweet while crass.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Kevin Smith

Happy Valentine's Day!  I guess I'm going to be writing about Clerks III. (Note: In an attempt to catch up to the offensive amount of movies that I've watched due to the Academy Awards, I'm not writing this ON Valentine's Day.  It just so happens to be scheduled to be posted on Valentine's Day.)  Why did I take a break from my steady diet of Academy Award nominees?  I want to get nominee discs through Netflix DVD, but those aren't available.  So I had to shotgun Clerks III in hopes that The Fablemans would be available next.  It's a flawed system, but it's the best I got.

I hate that I keep coming back to this well.  I've borderline written this review fairly recently, with Jay and Silent Bob Reboot.  I love Kevin Smith.  I specifically love him as a personality and a talking head because that man knows how to turn a phrase.  Sure, he's crass.  I have no problem with that.  But my goodness, he keeps making the same movie. I know, I am being extremely unfair to a guy who tried to make a movie about who he is now versus who he was thirty years ago.  But that's the thing he's always been doing.  Okay, there's sometihng fascinating about coming back and reassing who you are.  But Smith, honestly, hasn't grown all that much.  I will give credit that Clerks III is probably his most mature film in the sense that he actually has something that he really wants to say with this one.  But it's also just Clerks.  Almost everything he makes is just a version of Clerks again.  It's kind of a perversion of auteur theory.  It's like a one hit wonder slightly changing the song over-and-over to maintain presence in the zeitgeist.  I don't need a thousand versions of "Baby Shark".  I want something new.

I guess that brings me to the obvious evidence against me: Jersey Girl and Cop Out.  Now, he didn't write Cop Out, but I'm still going to count it towards something positive.  Both Jersey Girl and Cop Out (along with Tusk and a couple of other movies that I didn't see...yet) aren't Jay and Bob movies.  These movies are infamously...not great.  Basically, I am advocating for him to make more movies like Jersey Girl and Cop Out. Yeah, that's a weird take to have considering how much consensus, even from the director himself, that these movies aren't great.  But I am going to say that they are something new from Kevin Smith.  I have this thing with my students who succeeded early on.  As much as you would think it would be the kids who struggle that would be hard to teach, you would be wrong.  It's often the kids who have natural talent and have received recognition for that talent that really are frustrating to teach. I'm going to use writing as an example because I was that kid and I relate. 

As many typos and non-sequiturs litter this blog, understand that, if I really took my time and went back and rewrote my blogs, there would be some quality to them. Considering that my blog is just way too wordy and I am to bring daily content to the blog, that's kind of impossible.  But when I was in high school, I won a state award for writing.  I pat myself on the back to this day, even though I absolutely should not give myself any applause for that because that award destroyed my writing for years.  What happened, and what happens to a lot of students, (and I'm lumping Kevin Smith into this) is that they hear affirmation about something that they did that was right.  When something doesn't garner them positive comments or accolades, they revert to the thing that did bring affirmation.  It's writing for one audience.  They embrace that whole idiom, "Jack of All Trades, Master of None." See, it's good to hone a craft.  But Smith isn't honing a craft so much as he's returning to the same well over-and-over.  Even in terms of natural growth, I think he's afraid to step out of a comfort zone. 

When Clerks came out in 1994, he was a student filmmaker with a limted budget and independent actors.  He's not that anymore.  In my head, Kevin Smith is doing just fine financially.  He's directed big budget movies to limited success.  But the big takeaway is that Cop Out didn't fail because of anything he did.  He serviced that script exactly how it asked to be serviced.  He worked with a big personality that was almost intentionally sabotaging the film.  He can get performances out of people.  He can work with a camera that moves.  He can make better movies than he's making.  I mean, Rosario Dawson is in two of these Clerks movies.  She's clearly the only one who is delivering performances that are worthy of Smith's experience in the business.  That's because she's bringing her A-game to every day of shooting, regardless of how little the filmmakers think about their own film.  There's no reason to have these cue-card readings.  It's because Smith keeps going back to what is safe: low expectations and his fanbase.  Clerks III, for what it was, could have been something glorious.

I'm about to say something pretty damning.  I don't know if I covered this already, but I'm writing over the course of many days.  (I've written four blogs in one day once.  I am so busy right now, that Clerks III has somehow taken me three days to write.) As much as Clerks changed the landscape of independent cinema, taking it from high brow to low brow and inviting the everyman to partake in the conversation, it's not as big a deal as Kevin Smith has made it.  It's important to him.  It's important to View Askew fans.  But making a meta narrative about Randal basically recreating the first Clerks movie is cute without the emotional weight that Smith is trying to imbue.  Any philosophy in extremes is problematic. Yes, I believe that an artist should make what he knows.  It just scans. But Kevin Smith is almost only touching things that he knows at this point.  Kevin Smith both directed Clerks and he suffered a life-changing heart attack.  Clerks III is about directing Clerks and about surviving a life-changing heart attack.  That's...too much.  Do you know why I say that?  He's non-stop talked about the heart-attack.  Jay and Silent Bob Reboot also touched on the heart attack, if I'm remembering right.  There is more to say than just this tiny myopic worldview.  I love Kevin Smith.  I do.  It feels like I really hate him right now.  I don't. I just think that he's better than the nonstop flattery he gets from his fanbase.  

I loved View Askew for a long time.  I was in college at just the right time to be into View Askew.  I would write off Kevin Smith as a one trick pony if it wasn't for something that's a bit more off-the-grid than the rest of his films.  I'm talking about his superhero comic works.  Now, this seems like I'm just leaning into bias and maybe I am.  But both his work on Daredevil and Green Arrow still hold up as some of the best work done with either character.  These are stories that aren't littered with "Snoochie Boochies" or hamfisted drug references.  These are stories that are infamously pigeonholed as action stories and they are injected with character and emotion. Not only that, but they're great superhero stories.  I'm not saying that Smith should now do superhero stuff.  Maybe he should.  I don't care.  I just want Smith to work for something with constrictions again.  He can't be the start-to-finish guy who has to like these stories. He's far too talented to make stuff like Clerks III.

This next criticism is personal because I really don't like it.  I fight with myself over this because I wonder if I'm just reacting as the butt of the joke.  I don't think I am because I've heard the joke done way better and laughed a lot at the joke.  (I'm really trying to free myself of bias, guys.) If all of Kevin Smith's jokes are childish, his religious jokes are infantile.  Are there people like Elias?  Maybe.  But are you really criticizing Christianity if you use Elias as your example?  Elias is so intensely over-the-top that there's no relating to him. What comment is being made about Elias' fair-weather obsession with Christ?  Every single time that Elias was on-screen, it was a groan.  Again, not on the actor. It's entirely on the sophomoric view of Christianity from the perspective of a vocal atheist.  It's trying to capture Dogma all over again without even a hint of nuance.

Now, is that to say that there isn't anything worth redeeming in Clerks III?  He covers this in the movie, but the original ending to Clerks had Dante die by gunshot.  Now, that ending would have been the most try-hard thing ever.  But Dante's death at the end of Clerks III was incredibly vulnerable.  If the story is about dealing with a heart attack and surviving, Dante's death is an understanding of what Smith's mortality means. It's both an exploration of fear and an acceptance that he feels accomplished in his life.  It's also Kevin Smith letting go of something.  I mean, sure, Becky is back as a ghost, but she at least died between movies.  Also, I can see Dante talking to Randal as a memory for small amounts of time.  But I can't imagine that Kevin Smith would do a whole movie where Dante is there for the whole movie as a memory.  (Now that I said it, it is totally doable and I feel guilty that I've somehow willed this into the universe.)

I feel like a heel for writing all of this.  Maybe it is the overly aggressive English teacher in me, but I'm more disappointed than angry.  Kevin Smith is such a talented dude that to laud this as his new magnum opus is just a lack of belief in himself.  He needs to make bad movies where he's out of his comfort zone until he makes the one that's great.  I know he tried it for a little bit, but there's a birthing process.  Sure, he's older than I am, but he has so much talent that it's going to click when it clicks.  I'm not even saying don't make independent films.  I think he should still make independent films. But he needs to stop treating them like the independent films of the '90s.  Make something impressive and leave Jay and Bob behind.