Pops was telling me something he thought I didn't know, which was that Hezbollah has hospitals. Yes, Hezbollah has hospitals. Everybody has hospitals. Everybody has children. You can pretty much bet that no matter how sleazy, depraved, evil, wicked, mean and nasty people are, if they get ill they'll want to be healed.
What has this got to do with Clerks 2, the latest from Kevin Smith? Everything. Because in the end, his characters, lost & confused, perverted & lackadaisical, idiotic & profane all have souls that need to be healed. What Smith has done is something of a minor miracle. He has taken several degrees of witless and dysfunctional characters and made an almost heartwarming story littered with brazen hilarity. He has provided healing and closure for Dante Hicks, the man who wasn't supposed to be there.
It's hard to imagine that even in a nation so large as ours, that there could possibly be individuals so lost in the moment that they spend 10 years working at a convenience store in defiance of their own dreams and ambitions. And yet Hicks, whose decency and restraint has left him as the only responsible person, has survived on this thin gruel of New Jersey existence with a decent part of his self-respect intact. He is one step above loser, and his best friend Randall, is a loser, in fact God of Losers who insures that everyone else on the loser totem pole stays in their rightful place.
If America has within its borders, a nation of misfits, slackers, addicts, perverts and idiots with very few socially redeeming characteristics or ambitions, then director Kevin Smith is the poet laureate of that nation. His dialog is a perfectly suited vehicle, rather in the style of the Coen Brothers' 'Raising Arizona', for the overly worded protestations of the semi-intelligent. And in that way, they bring his characters to life in ways that so many other films cannot do. But make no mistake about it, Smith has no ambitions to elevate any of our sensibilities above the inane. This is what makes 'Clerks 2' the ultimate movie to stage a dweeb smackdown about the great fanboy rivalry Lord of the Rings vs Star Wars.
I have to admit that I wasn't dressed down properly for going to this film, and hadn't ingested quite the right complement of (contraband) pre-movie fare. Plus I had to keep my buddha on to keep from smacking the kid behind me kicking my chair. Still, if you're looking for a flick to take your head out of civilization and you have a stomach for the extremely crude, than Clerks 2 is a great way to kill a couple hours. By View Askew standards, this one gets 4 out of 5 stars.
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