Directed by:
Kevin SmithScreenplay:
Kevin SmithCinematography:
David KleinCast:
Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Marilyn Ghigliotti, Lisa Spoonauer, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Scott Mosier, David Klein, Walter Flanagan, Scott Schiaffo (more)VOD (1)
Plots(1)
It's a bad day for Dante Hicks, the 22-year-old cash-register jockey at the QuickStop convenience store in Leonardo, NJ. He was supposed to have the day off to play hockey with his pals. Instead he's stuck at work fending off irate and pushy customers. He is fighting with his girlfriend, Veronica, who stuns him with revelations of her past adventures in oral sex, and he's reeling from the news that his ex-girlfriend is about to marry "an Asian design major". Before the day is over, a customer will die on him, he'll be fined for selling cigarettes to a 4 year old, and his old flame will have sex with a corpse. Next door at the video store, his irritating best friend, Randal, is busy insulting his customers and provoking Dante into trouble. (Disney / Buena Vista)
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Reviews (9)
For the umpteenth time, I've never understood why audiences love a movie that can't be funny and so has to resort to reaching for the bottom. But here I don't get it at all! They put a couple of greasy-haired ponytails behind the counter. They tell them to spout one old bullshit after another and talk dirty. When they had nowhere left to go, they started getting lame (really lame) about sex... and for what? Kevin Smith may be all things... just not a god.
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Well, I expected more for sure. I didn’t have any fits of laughter, I only laughed rather sporadically. Kevin Smith’s script turns blabbering about nothing into dialogues with a cult status, but I prefer conversations that are funny in a bit smarter way. I hope that the second part leaves a better impression.
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An incredibly inexpensive film, when Kevin Smith used his experience from working in a shop and wrote a script based on crude humor and bizarre characters of urban slackers, street dealers, and misfits of all kinds. The plot is not important, what matters are the dialogues filled with slang, vulgarisms, and an incredible cadence of various phrases and mostly well-functioning jokes. Thanks to this film, Smith became a recognized icon of the American independent scene and could afford to launch the production of provoking, disrespectful, and in many ways provocative films in a grand style. Clerks is certainly not a perfect film, the technical quality is poor, but it has so much energy, courage, and non-conformity in it that I forgive it for many more things. Overall impression 95%.
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An overturned coffin with an ex-girlfriend or a story about a broken neck during oral sex in a car is truly funny when presented by Smith, but especially in the first half, the dialogues of the characters suffer from self-interest syndrome without a drop of wit or any shift in the plot. It would have been better to push the envelope more using dry humor (which Smith later proved he could do brilliantly), or to let the life wisdom surface at a lower cadence and in a more natural way, rather than bolting it on to episodic scenes with store visitors. It’s definitely entertaining, but Smith proved his virtuosity later.
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It's hard for me to find the words, so I'll write it simply: this film is just terrible bollocks, maybe very cleverly made and with nice performances, but still blatant bollocks about nothing, where almost nothing happens and it ends up kind of.... nowhere. I don't deny that it's quite original in its essence, sometimes even funny and the viewer never gets bored (hence the 3*), but I have a bit of a different idea of what a quality and for some even cult comedy should be. Anyway, for a few of his later films, Smith still has my favour :-) 60%
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