Clerks III

It's quite fun to try and spot the famous names who pepper this otherwise puerile and really rather unfunny film - but that was about it for me. It's all about a "Dante" (Brian O'Halloran) and "Elias" (Trevor Fehrman) who run a small-town store. They spend much of their day quoting lines from their favourite films until poor old "Elias" has an heart attack. Whisked to hospital, his friends decide to make a film about life in their convenience store. What now ensues may well offer us an isight into just how a sudden medical emergency can focus the attention and motivate people, but I just found the references either too in-your-face or absurdly obscure and contrived. Perhaps this will rate better in the USA, but here in the UK this just comes across as a rather sad indictment of rural life where it's all about weed and dumb wheezes. It is extremely difficult to marry the threads of humour and tragedy. Dark humour, in my view, is the hardest to write and play well - and I am afraid that nobody here really carries it off with much distinction. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood, but I didn't hear anyone else in the cinema laughing either. Not for me, sorry.

I guess Kevin Smith is irrelevant. But, as the Dark Knight pointed out "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." I guess Smith live long enough. Chasing Amy was always my favorite, but Clerks and Mall Rats were classics, Clerks II was pretty hysterical, Dogma (especially if you are Catholic like me) is absolutely cutting and brilliantly so. Jay and Silent Bob... to much of the side characters, but at the end of the day they all had something in common... ... they all cut into fandoms in only the way that fans, legit come to the comic book store every Wednesday, know what Diamond Distribution is fans of geek fandoms can completely and hysterically criticize the things they love. He even cut into the original Star Wars. It was Geek Counter Culture and we loved every minute of it. Clerks III has NONE OF THAT. Smith used to criticize pop culture, and now that he's part of it, his scripts don't work. They lost their edge. The brilliance of his early work has faded to the land of sell outs. Now you are more likely to see him weep over a bad Star Wars movie in an obvious shill than you are to see him make jokes about how many innocent construction workers died in the second Death Star. And when he stopped being able to take apart fandom's and playfully make jabs at them, when he stopped criticizing pop culture and started to shill for it, he became irrelevant. There is no need to watch Clerks III, everything that made the first two... that made most of his early work great is absent in this on.