Clerks 3

As has been noted, I'll believe it when I see it. Even if it does eventuate, I'm definitely worried that it won't be good - I'm worried that the first half of his career won't hold up and I liked virtually nothing from the second half (with the exception of Red State and even then I think that won't hold up on rewatch).

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Kevin Smith’s idea for Clerks 3 is based on his life-changing and near-ending experience (a heart attack that almost killed him a couple years ago), and it is a genius idea that brings the whole Clerks saga full circle.

https://collider.com/clerks-3-plot-kevin-smith/

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“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!” ~ Rocky Balboa

I think he's already talked about how Clerks III would be centred on Dante and Randal making a movie at the Quick Stop (and he arguably already did the "filming at work" thing with Zack and Miri Make A Porno), though I suppose the heart attack lends it extra perspective. The real question is whether or not it will truly mean anything - or mean anything good. I'm thinking of how Clerks II, which read like a defiant screed about staying true to yourself when I first saw it, now reads like an excuse to stay in a rut (as evidenced by how it followed the f*ck-the-haters attitude of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and also much of his subsequent work). Maybe the fact that he'll actually have to properly contend with the passage of time and a brush with mortality will prove the inspiration necessary to push this above and beyond the average Kevin Smith movie, so I might actually be looking forward to this now.

Lionsgate just got the rights and shooting finally begins next month in New Jersey. Jeff Anderson, Brian O'Halloran, Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes, and Rosario Dawson are all returning and yes, it will be about the gang making a movie at the Quick Stop after Randal suffers a heart attack.

Dark Horizons

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I don't know what to think of this. As much as I love Clerks, Clerks II was... not very good, and Kevin Smith's output (or what I've seen of it) has been diminishing with every entry, as far as I'm concerned (Zack and Miri Make a Porno was another one that was pretty bad). So I'm not holding out hopes for this.

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The worst director in history revisiting the diminishing returns of his only (barely) viable work with yet another sequel will go just about as well as it sounds.

His early work was top notch, before his ego ruined things for him. And his reluctance to “grow up” along with the material.
Clerks is far more then “viable”, and Dogma is, along with Clerks, a classic of the 90’s.
Worst director in history is hyperbole, considering I can name far worse directors who didn’t even have half the same creativity as Smith’s early career.

Well, I guess it depends on what we look for and value in cinema that makes us determine who the worst is. If what he does works for you, great. Have at it. But I can assure you that when it comes to what I look for, I'm not being hyperbolic when I say I think he's the worst. Or at least pretty damn close out of any 'name' directors.

What do I value? It would be one of the following

1) A director who devotes himself to the craft of filmmaking in the hopes of mastering the form

2) Anyone, knowingly or unknowingly, who somehow upsets the standard cinematic form through their passion or delusion towards making movies. If you don't have it in you to bend the medium to your whims, then break it and see what you can do with that.

3) Failing these other two, at least some discernable philosophy that makes me understand why the director is compelled to make film and what he wants to do with them.

I see dont' see much of any of this in Smith's work that envigorates my senses in regards to any of these points. When it comes to Clerks, I do think he stumbled towards something of value. Through his characteristic laziness in learning the form, and his obsession with ephemeral pop references, the film feels really emblematic of that generation. And I don't say that as a total backhanded compliment. I think that's important. But it's really a movie that at this point is only interesting to me anthropologically, not as an actual movie I'd want to watch on its own merits. I once thought is was vaguely funny, and now I don't know why I ever thought that. The only thing I still find somewhat charming about it was the discovery of Jason Mewes, who is a compulsively watchable weirdo.

Ultimately, what makes me hate Smith's work so much is how profound his lack of curiosity is about the very medium he uses. He doesn't care about the potential of all the things it can do. He's actively bored by this notion. He says as much in interviews at the time. I find that attitude personally offensive. Now, should he have to adhere to what I want from a movie. Of course not. He basically made Clerks (and much of his follow up work) because he wanted to just film the kinds of conversations he likes to hear (or, more accurately, a bunch of characters talking exactly like he talks). And I guess that's kind of a philosophy. Sort of. But when I don't even particularly like the conversations he films, documenting a world where everyone talks in Star Wars references until the sun comes up, you can't blame me when his movies annoy the **** out of me.

Obviously we each look for our own type of enjoyment from cinema, and what value we seek from it. It’s quite different with each person. This goes without saying. But I do thank you for your explanation on what you personally look for
I can agree with a lot of your complaints towards his later work, although i feel it worked early on before it became a broken record.
He never “grew up”, and as such, never allowed his material to mature with him. Clerks and Dogma were irreverent, but there was some wisdom behind them as well. Eventually, even with his early aughts output (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Clerks 2) had their moments, and indeed made me laugh, but for the life of me, I never understood his over reliance on gross out humor.
Clerks 2 even had hints of maturity before he, for some reason, felt the need to degrade a poor donkey.

Somewhere along the way, he lost his touch.

But that was after Clerks and Dogma.

About damn time!

I understand some people disliking Kevin Smith and his films. They are definitely not for everybody. Kevin Smith is not in the great directors ranks. Even he doesn't take himself seriously. I personally find his films and his humor entertaining.

For those who dislike him, I recommend watching the An Evening with Kevin Smith series. The man can talk and can tell a story like no other.

Here's a clip of him telling the story about his beef with Tim Burton.

I did watch both An Evening With Kevin Smith videos a while back and, as amusing as individual segments can be, they're not helped at all by four-hour runtimes with plenty of dead air - besides, if a person's problem with Smith's directorial films is rooted in disliking his humour and storytelling, then I'm not sure watching him simply tell funny stories into a microphone is going to make much of a difference.

That being said, even going by crumbsroom's rhetoric for what makes a bad filmmaker you can still a lot worse than Smith - you can still discern an ethos that would distinguish it from the even more vacuous and reference-centric humour of Seltzer and Friedberg, for instance.

I imagine if I had ever seen a Seltzer/Friedberg movie, they would be worse. There is a level of cynicism in what I've seen and heard of them that is infinitely worse than even Kevin Smiths sin of laziness. Comedy definitely has a tendency to draw in the efforts of the worst kinds of cinematic hacks. So, yeah, in this pool there are probably a number of others also worse then Smith. Thankfully, I will see as few of these movies as humanly possible, and more often than not, directors in comedies rarely become 'names' that anyone would recognize.



I actually like An Evening with Kevin Smith. He is somewhat gifted as a guy who can just talk and tell stories. He's relatable in this very particular situation. I can even get why a guy like that would want to make movies about people who all talk like him. But something gets lost when he diffuses his voice through a bunch of different characters. Unlike with his speaking, he's not talented enough of a writer to make his words work as dialogue. What can be funny when it comes directly from him, falls flat in the mouths of others. And over the course of a movie it becomes cloying to not be able to escape this monomaniacal world view of his coming at you from every direction. It also creates a sense of everything being staged and artificial in the kind of movie that really needs to feel like people are talking off the cuff. Some writers can get away with this kind of thing. Tarantino or Stillman or Jarmusch are both talented enough with language, as well as willing to embrace some amount of cinematic artifice, to make their very specific cadences work for the screen. Kevin Smith just doesn't know how to make this sort of thing work though, and to my ears, it always rings painfully hollow in his films.

That's fair. I don't really entertain the notion of "worst" directors because, as you already noted, there is an inherent reluctance to sample enough of their work to determine for sure if they're the worst (and also suggests that if you go out of your way to watch more films by a bad director then maybe you don't find their work that bad anyway) so you really are going off your own subjectivity more than if you were trying to determine the best directors. I've only seen one Seltzer-Friedberg movie but that felt like enough to convince me that the rest were similarly awful but I've somehow managed to see every Kevin Smith film even though I started to give up on him after seeing Zack and Miri so...yeah.

The first official photo was released: Elias, Dante, Becky, and Randal are all back!

Unless he maxes out his credit cards to make this, it’s not Clerks.

BTW. If anyone ever listens to Brian Johnson, it’s easy to see why he’s the real-life Randal.

That photo does not give me hope....

havent watched clerks for ages only seen the first one lol D=

You’re doing it right!

cause the first ones always better then other 2!!!