Notes From My Recliner: Kevin Smith's Safe Place
Posted by Ben Moser on 12.01.2006
Why Jay and Silent Bob need to take an even longer vacation this time around.
Have you gone out to your local video store and picked up the Clerks II DVD yet? Have you wondered why you call it your local video store when they've been fully converted to DVD for years? Clerks II, for those of you who haven't seen it, is hilarious. As far as laugh-out-loud moments go, it's at or at least near the top of the View Askewniverse lineup of flicks. I love those characters, and I love how funny they can be. That's why what I have to say is a little bit painful for me, but it has to be said.
Kevin Smith has to let those characters and that world go for the foreseeable future.
As much as I loved Clerks II, I cringed when I heard it was being made. Mostly because I was pretty sure what was going on. Jersey Girl was a tremendous flop. Suffering from the loser stick that Gigli had sprayed on on the Affleck & J-Lo connection and the fact that the pair were on the cover of every magazine at the check-out line, people stayed away from Jersey Girl in droves.
Smith had tanked at the box office before, though. Critics shredded Mallrats while a general public unfamiliar with Clerks wrote it off as just another dumb comedy. Fortunately for us all, Kevin Smith was able to dust off his jacket and get back in there with the very personal Chasing Amy, which I consider to be far and away his best work.
The big difference between Mallrats and Jersey Girl is that Mallrats was actually good. It turned out that critics, as they are want to, had no idea what they were watching when they trashed it. They didn't see that it was, sometimes even in spite of itself, a hip movie("hip" isn't really a word that I use, but it's how they would have described it if they had known who this movie would end up speaking to). Mallrats is funny. Mallrats is good. I'd go so far as to say that I've likely not watched any single flick more times. Smith was able to bounce back because I think he knew that he'd made a winner whether people were ready to acknowledge it or not.
Jersey Girl, however, was just as bad as people feared it would be. Personally, it took me three tries before I could even make it all the way through the movie in one sitting. Each time I'd look for something redeeming about it. When I finally made it to the end, I'd found nothing. I think Smith knew this one was just as bad as he knew Mallrats was good. So, not knowing what else to do, he went back to the well.
I was actually kind of saddened to see Smith go back to his View Askewniverse so quickly. The man is clever and creative to an almost embarrassing level, and I think he's got a lot more to offer than callbacks to a movie he made more than ten years ago. I'd call comic book fans to his work on Daredevil, Green Arrow, and the first half of The Evil that Men Do for further proof that the sky is the limit for what Smith might be able to achieve.
But he can't be allowed to let Jersey Girl scare him. He needs to keep trying different things. If nothing else works(and I find this possibility highly unlikely), then of course he can go back to the well. He can make a new Clerks animated series, Clerks III, Still Chasing Amy, and Attack of the Clones of Jay & Silent Bob. The thing is, I'll want to see two or three Jersey Girl-level disasters before he does this.
The other possibility is an expanded vision for Smith on film that works. He can make two or three films that are smart, funny, and worth a lot of scratch. Then you know what he can do if he feels like it rather than because he thinks he has to? He can go back to the characters that got him where he is. It will be a labor of love rather than a retreat to what he knows he can do.
Either way, Jay & Silent Bob will be back. I'd just prefer if it took them a while.
