In this year’s Messenger-adored Clerks III, cult indie filmmaker Kevin Smith injected “carpe diem” energy into his aged and suburbia-enraged Clerks characters.
The famous heart attack survivor deployed feature-length fuel out of a self-commenting “living on borrowed time” theme. He channeled enough fanservice magic and mad-cap meta into the film to set Dante, Randal and their New Jersian brethren off on a course to literally make the original Clerks in the franchise’s beautiful exclamation point-for-a-third-installment.
This was not the first time Smith made a movie that’s essentially about the making of his first movie, the National Film Registry-inducted low-budget gamechanger that was 1994’s Clerks. He actually did it a decade-and-a-half earlier as well.
Easily his most revered and Smithian non-contained universe outing, Smith’s sweet-and-sour high school reunion sendoff Zack and Miri (2008) meets at the intersection of John Hughes Avenue and Judd Apatow Lane. It’s the hungover presidents of the breakfast club still making super-bad choices as adults because their purgatorial residency in Monroeville, Pennsylvania never morphed into the “Shermer, Illinois” promised land.
The plight of a pair of opposite-sex platonic best friends who discover amateur filmmaking and distribution via the Internet could help them pay their dire apartment bills should have become another money-making Seth Rogen classic. As always, logic said to blame Disney— as Zack and Miri’s fiercest box-office competitor upon its October 2008 release, High School Musical 3: Senior Year, completely devoured them in marketing and screen acquisition.
Zack and Miri holds up as an objectively tough-to-beat Thanksgiving entry, with its Thanksgiving Eve-set high school reunion inciting incident being one of the topfive funniest scenes of the 21st century. This sequence is where the titular duo – played by Rogen and Elizabeth Banks – are inspired by a former classmate-madegood as an actor in Los Angeles to set off on a cinematic path themselves. In the film, Smith relies on his “sexfactor,” raunchy text and poignant subtext brand like only he can– regardless of whether or not Jay and Silent Bob are present to comically divert attention from the tension and the big blow-up to which it was building. What winds up a tribute to the rag-tag ensemble that helped Smith makeshift make his movie wayback-when ultimately also becomes what Miri accuses Seth of in jest early on– that he only conceived their movie venture to address what they truly mean to each other beyond friendship.
While Smith shot Clerks in the middle of the night at the QuickStop he worked at in real life, his autobiographical insert, Zack, is driven to his unprecedented ambition while heading an after-hours production in the coffee shop that employs him as a begrudged barista. Smith and Zack both love hockey sticks used as booms, Jeff Anderson as foulmouthed hockey goalies and permitting a wild-card Jason Mewes to play a cartoon-come-to-life.
Complications occurred on-set in the movie within the movie, as lines between fiction and reality became blurred. Smith was clearly working through his own knack to alienate his friends – perhaps like his most famous friend and collaborator, Ben Affleck – for his tendency to overshare stories “that weren’t his to tell.”
His relentless honesty may be an Achilles’ heel, but it’s also Smith’s strongest asset as a storyteller. It amplifies the authenticity emitting from his characters who, especially in Zack and Miri (save for Mewes’ Lester/Pete Jones), come across as real people rather than constructions of real people.
The (barely) unaffiliated Zack and Miri, like Clerks II before it and his returns to his beloved View Askewniverse in the years since, was Smith gifting the friends and family who inspired his film path the greatest gift of all.
“If Die Hard is a Christmas movie, then Zack and Miri is a Thanksgiving movie,” said Brian Gavin, 26, of Hauppauge. “Make sure you watch it with your friends while they’re back in town this week– I would if I were.”
Smith was nearly seduced by the big studio appeal but creative control-relinquishing certainty of involvement with projects like Daredevil, Green Hornet and a Fletch reboot. But choosing to go beyond justifiably revisiting Clerks’ Dante and Randal to instead create two new soulmates of a certain sort in Zack and Miri served as an always-welcome reminder from the personal mythos-embroiled Smith.
Becoming quote-unquote Hollywood did not make Kevin Smith lose sight of where he came from, and who made him him.
Clerks III accomplished much of the same, except it was about making the first film— whereas Zack and Miri was about making an adult film. Did I forget to mention that? In hindsight, maybe that’s also why it only made $42.8 million against a $24 million budget at the box office— just $300,000 less than Boogie Nights (1997).
