Critical Analysis: Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith - IMDb

He's pretty divisive these days, so this should be a good one.

 

When I was a senior in high school I was dating a college freshman who lived in the dorms. I went to see her and watched Clerks on her roommate's laptop with three other students. It was a harrowing experience.

 

Chasing Amy is one of my favorite films and probably my favorite of Smith's work. His recent transition into making these odd low budget "do whatever I feel like" kind of films is a bit questionable but I'll have to admit that Tusk was pretty awesome. I have a soft spot for Clerks obviously, and Dogma isn't bad. Never latched on to Mallrats that much but it's probably been a decade since I've seen it. Red State was forgettable.

 

I know he gets a lot of shit, but I'm a KS apologist. Maybe I was just the right age when Clerks and Mallrats were introduced to me. I don't give a shit about Comic Book Men or anything else outside of his directing really, but I've enjoyed most of his films.

Chasing Amy and Dogma are probably my favorites, but even the non-comedies (Tusk and Red State) were interesting/fun.

 

Tusk fascinates me. I want to watch.

 

You haven't seen it?

 

Red State and Zack and Miri were the last two scripts he wrote before he completely changed his lifestyle and became Stoner Kev.

Since that change I have become completely uninterested in the "podcast movies" he makes. I still have hope for Clerks 3 and am interested to see what he does with Mallrats 2 because his strength is the characters in the ViewAskewniverse.

 

seen all of his films except for Red State Tusk and Yoga Hosers which isn't yet isn't it

I don't know my favorite of his, I do know my least favorite, Cop Out was so unfunny

I think my favorite scene is still the Pillowpants scene from Clerks 2

 

i haven't seen Clerks. i'm an asshole.

1) Dogma
2) Chasing Amy
3) Jay and Silent Bob
4) Mallrats
5) Zach and Miri
6) Red State
7) Jersey Girl
8) Tusk

 

Nope

 

I feel like people either love it or hate it. It was an experience, that's all I can say.

 

Haven't seen his last few flicks. Clerks is in my top 5 all time. I've found him harder to follow and enjoy these days because he does so much in terms of putting out types of material into the world. He's over saturated himself these days if you ask me. Stoked on Clerks 3 though. So stoked.

 

I'm on the fence with him. While Mallrats and Chasing Amy, Dogma and J&S are awesome, I've never seen Clerks or the sequel, and I can't stand his take on the horror genre.

I think he had his time in the mid-late 90's, but I don't really care for anything he's done recently.

I equate him to the stretch of Pauly Shore movies in the early-mid 90's.

 

I love the guy, and will watch anything he ever does, but I can't sing high praise for most of his movies. That being said, Cop Out is the only one I dislike, and I'm really curious to see how Yoga Hosers turns out. The trailer looks fucking terrible, and I know he edits that stuff himself, so I have trouble thinking it's just the case of a poor trailer. I loved Tusk, largely due to the charisma of my man Justin Long and his interactions with Park, but Yoga Hosers stars two young actors and though I'm really hoping they can pull it off, it doesn't seem like the dialogue is giving them much to work with.

P.S. Clerks 3 is basically my most anticipated film of all time

 

Chasing Amy is his best movie, with Zack and Miri coming right behind.

 

Chasing Amy is probably his most mature movie (odd that it happened so early), and it has some great scenes. Zack and Miri is one of my favourites too. It doesn't break any new ground, but it does the story so well, has great casting, and is incredibly rewatchable

 

Clerks is the type of movie I respect in which it proved that anyone motivated enough can make a movie, especially at a time where technology like smart phones wasn't available so he had to rely on traditional filming techniques while going into debt. It's a terrific script that established his humor but my one complaint is the actors' delivery of their lines were often rushed and they couldn't do it organically. Jeff Anderson was the shining star and I wished he achieved more work.
Chasing Amy is my personal favorite due in part of such a great unconventional love story not to mention it was at a point after Smith was handed a sizable budget for Mallrats and that came to be a box office bomb (I still enjoy it for the most part). So he went and created a personal story that produced terrific acting by Affleck, Adams and Jason Lee.
Dogma was my introduction to the View Askewniverse and I liked its take on religion at the time but revisiting it lately just comes off as overly preachy.
J&SBSB being filled with in-jokes and celebrity cameos was fun when it came out but it just seemed so out of place with his general tone, like he was going for strictly slapstick, which was sad in retrospect given Jason Mewes drug addiction at the time.
Jersey Girl was a decent effort given the fact that it reflected his time as a new father. I don't mind if he decided to step out of his comfort zone to try something different.
I still like Clerks II, despite the mismatching between Rosario Dawson and Brian O'Halloran.
Zack & Miri was a decent effort but I think Elizabeth Banks was the best part of it.
Tracy Morgan was the only shining star of Cop Out. I don't mind if it was strictly a director-for-hire opportunity for Smith, and his experience with Bruce Willis was disappointing to read in Smith's book.
Considering I was previously well-read into the Westboro Baptist Church and their tactics, Red State was underwhelming for me. I respect Smith's effort into trying a new genre but it just didn't have the impact he was trying to accomplish.
Tusk was... interesting. I don't mind his efforts to trying something new, especially going back to a low budget work ethic. I do plan on seeing Yoga Hosers at some point.

 

Red State is my favorite film of his. I'd love him to collaborate with John Goodman again.

 

I thought Red State was pretty ambitious. I heard him say that when writing the script, whenever he felt like he could predict where the story was headed, he would go in the opposite direction, and I thought that was a really cool way of writing, especially when compared to something as straightforward as Zack and Miri. I do wish it went a step further and retained the original ending though

 

Grew up a big Kevin Smith fan. Mallrats started it all for me. Watched it as a kid (long before I should have). It isn't a "good" film, but it's a comedy I identify with my youth and can still go back and appreciate. Everything before Clerks II I ate up. Chasing Amy and Dogma still both hold up for me really well.

But as he tried to branch out outside his universe, the films got worse and worse for me. As an avid listener of SModcast since the beginning, I know he blamed a lot Zack and Miri's un-success on a Halloween release date being pushed upon him by the studio, but honestly it just wasn't that good of a film. The first act up through the class reunion was fine, but everything after that was a complete bore. It started his weed-haze and everything past that point has been an incredibly disjointed venture.

I think he's also suffered from his personal transparency towards the film-making process a bit too. IIRC, he had some of his ideas "stolen" (for lack of a better term) with Cop Out and Hit Somebody. Ideas that turned into even better films in The Other Guys and Goon. Maybe not so much with Cop Out, as I know the Other Guys came out later in 2010 and he was basically just a hired gun, but Hit Somebody definitely. It was a weird scenario where he had pegged Shawn William Scott to play a thug-turned-hockey player in a comedy, and then something happened during the early pre-production process, and before you know it SWS is playing a thug-turned-hockey player in a completely different comedy.

I didn't like Red State nearly as much as I wanted to, and definitely don't think it's as good as the fan base received it. I've only seen it once or twice, but I thought it got far too much kudos for simply NOT being a Kev comedy about dicks and blunts. Tusk was awful, Yoga Hosers looks awful.

It's not fair to blame any of this on the weed, but it's probably not a coincidence at how scatter-brained his thought process appears to be. His projects come and go and twist and turn. Perhaps all of that is very common in the industry, and it's just because Kev let's us all into the journey via his podcast that it looks like he doesn't have as big a handle on it all. But I really doubt it.

 

A lot of his dialogue in those early movies felt this way to me.

YES

 

The only thing I've seen of his is Jersey Girl (which I really liked) but is his daughter really named Harley Quinn?

 

Yep, that's her name.

 

We get it Kevin... you like comic books!

Her name is still better than Nicolas Cage naming his son Kal-El.

 

So a daughter has to get made fun of throughout school because he likes a superhero series?