Smith = Tarantino

They have some hits, and they took some shits.

You shut your whore mouth.

Tarantino at the very least has a huge amount of love and enthusiasm for film and filmmaking. Smith doesn't even know what different camera lenses do, brags about writing scripts while so high he doesn't even remember them the next day, and wanted to make an action movie where all the fights happen offscreen because he couldn't be assed to learn how to actually move the camera.

M. Night Hostess Fruit Pie.

Lack of budget protected him from himself.

Also the good parts of Clerks were obviously based on real people or experiences.

Expecting consistency from Kevin Smith? Ha ha ha ha ha

Perfectly summarizes my feelings towards the dipshit anti-Smith brigade.

Just for the record: I'm not much of a Smith fan myself. But this clip, like most of his clips where he talks to an audience, was enjoyable.

I watched about four minutes and I heard a guy giving an honest breakdown of the business reality of his industry. He signed a legally binding contract and is doing everything he can to make movies, love 'em or hate 'em. Not getting paid for six years is his fault?

I guess if you never do any work you don't have to worry about dealing with shit.

Yes, because clearly... having an opinion and being critical of someone means you're unemployed.

Most people just have the decency to find another line of work if what they produce is consistently mediocre.

By work I meant "creative work".

If you watch enough movies you'll realise that what you consider mediocre is very, very difficult to do. 99.99999% of the people trying to do what Kevin Smith does (consistently well) fail miserably. I'm not a huge fan of his work overall, but I still respect his talent and production skills.

He struck a chord with Clerks but his movies are slogs to endure, in part because Smith claims his View Askew-niverse (ugh) stories are just fart and dick jokes, so don't take them so seriously people!!! but it's obvious we're supposed to take them seriously, as he jam packs his sophmoric social commentary into already overstuffed packages filled with his pretentious, hollow dialogue and the dick and fart jokes he uses as a cushion against criticism.

Or at least the ones I've seen, I said "no more" after being unable to make it through Chasing Amy.

I didn't know people took comedies so seriously.

Dogma was great. It doesn't age well, but I saw it in theaters back when it came out. The main thing was the audience participation. People lose their shit over the silliest things. There was a part where it looks like Matt Damon was wrong about some guy cheating on his wife and the girls in the audience were all "awww." Then when he obviously was cheating on his wife, and Matt Damon shot is ass, they cheered in unison.

Stuff like Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back are pure stoner humor. They're not going to blow your mind. Dogma wasn't even all that clever, either, but it had balls.

I'm kind of looking forward to this Walrus thing. I might have to see it in theaters on opening night to get the full effect.

Clerks came out at exactly the right time. It was most people's first exposure to post modern observational humor right when it was starting to form but before the internet made it common place.

It was also one of the many examples of "the little guy" creating an independent movie that clicked with his generation at the right time (in this case, white suburban teens and early twenties of the early 90's). People supported it and hyped it. It has the charming flaws that should be associated with an independent movie filmed by young amateurs (at the time), flaws that wind up glaring to someone who was hyped to see it...but in the end it deserves its cult status. Liking or disliking Clerks is not really a barometer in taste...I certainly will not judge you either way.

Anyways, Kevin Smith is an entertaining guy when he rants like this. Like a normal fan of popular shit, who is traversing the other side of the curtain. I just never understood the obsession with the hockey jerseys.

I do appreciate it as a cultural landmark, to use a twatphrase. A breakout, made for almost no money, with a unique sense of humour and the Tarantino-esque conversations about Star Wars - plus the 'my girlfriend sucked 37 dicks' was great. I want to like it more than I do. But as a movie going experience, and ignoring all the context, the acting keeps throwing me out of the otherwise immersive qualities.

Yeah the Star Wars conversation scene sums up the appeal of Clerks in a nutshell. That scene was amazingly brilliant and original in 1994, as was Tarantino's similar scenes.

Nowadays? There's dozens of flash movies of the same material uploaded to youtube every hour.