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I wonder if Anderson even knew about or remembered what Kevin said. It reminds me of when Kevin was in a feud with the Howard Stern show, and Howard Stern didn't know. Kevin Smith has these melodramatic blowups at others now and then.
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Apr 24, 2014 18:20
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I get the feeling that Kevin Smith thinks his Smodcast Network audience is bigger and far more influential than they actually are.
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Apr 24, 2014 19:15
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Paper Jam Dipper posted:The Clerks cartoon still holds up. Not much else. I think a lot of it comes from his self esteem issues. He thinks he wouldn't be good at it, so he picked the one thing he thought he was good at and stuck with it, all the way to the point of taking filmmaking out from between his points of view and his audience. He just talks directly into a microphone now. He's a really fascinating guy in many ways, but I wish he'd apply himself more often and stop taking criticism so hard. But I also grew up Catholic, and a lot of his behaviors are very familiar to me. I have those voices in my head, too, and if I had an entire industry talking poo poo about my baby, I'm not sure I could handle it either.
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Apr 24, 2014 23:41
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bartok posted:I get the feeling that Kevin Smith thinks his Smodcast Network audience is bigger and far more influential than they actually are. Oh, without question, he'll have a melodramatic meltdown online (he's been having them since the 90s) over some slight or criticism and almost have this expectation that his followers will take his cause. It's really rooted in a lot of his self-esteem and self-confidence issues that tied to his religious upbringing. As well his bizarre fixation with sexuality which I'm almost certain is because he grew up sexually repressed, watch Chasing Amy which has the kind of inappropriate curiousity routed in naivity tone whenever the characters talk about sex.
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Apr 25, 2014 00:42
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Kevin smith's characters talk about sex in a way that sounds insightful and provocative to young guys who've never had sex or hung out with people who do. It's a weird mix of conservative attitudes ("she sucked 20 dicks!") and faux bragging about how casual and crazy it is that a character is boning your girlfriend on their couch after work, EVERY NIGHT!
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Apr 26, 2014 06:45
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Honestly I don't think I've ever actually disliked a Kevin Smith movie. I also haven't seen Cop Out, but I did think Red State was okay, so I dunno.
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Apr 26, 2014 07:40
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SALT CURES HAM posted:Honestly I don't think I've ever actually disliked a Kevin Smith movie. I also haven't seen Cop Out, but I did think Red State was okay, so I dunno. You honestly like Zach & Miri?
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Apr 26, 2014 17:46
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Toady posted:I wonder if Anderson even knew about or remembered what Kevin said. It reminds me of when Kevin was in a feud with the Howard Stern show, and Howard Stern didn't know. Kevin Smith has these melodramatic blowups at others now and then. I remember heading stuff on that. To be fair to Smith, when someone brought that up in an audio interview he was pretty level-headed while in a separate interview Stern just kept insulting Smith.
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Apr 26, 2014 19:10
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Jimbot posted:I remember heading stuff on that. To be fair to Smith, when someone brought that up in an audio interview he was pretty level-headed while in a separate interview Stern just kept insulting Smith. I heard this Stern fellow is one of those Shocking Jockeys who thrive on controversy.
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Apr 26, 2014 19:47
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I was listening to Smith's podcast with Jon Lovitz and Lovitz has a huge appreciation for old films and most of his humor is derived from it and any time he brings up any famous director, actor, or movie from that time period Smith has no idea who he's talking about and Jon is always aghast because any lover of film would have watched these or at least know of their existence. Smith just has no real love or knowledge of film. I feel it comes from fear but it's also the kind of fear a high schooler feels when he realizes how big the world is and not an adult with a child who has a decade long career in an industry he is actively apathetic about.
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Apr 27, 2014 06:34
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Flatscan posted:You honestly like Zach & Miri? It was okay. Kinda forgettable, but I didn't feel like it was a waste of an hour and a half. Also, knowledge of film and love of film are not the same thing. Clearly the guy loves film or he wouldn't have been making them for roughly 20 years!
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Apr 27, 2014 07:15
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KidVanguard posted:I was listening to Smith's podcast with Jon Lovitz and Lovitz has a huge appreciation for old films and most of his humor is derived from it and any time he brings up any famous director, actor, or movie from that time period Smith has no idea who he's talking about and Jon is always aghast because any lover of film would have watched these or at least know of their existence. Smith just has no real love or knowledge of film. I feel it comes from fear but it's also the kind of fear a high schooler feels when he realizes how big the world is and not an adult with a child who has a decade long career in an industry he is actively apathetic about. But he loves Batman and Star Wars. Isn't that enough? Of course it's not. It's really no wonder he dropped out of film school, he's not a student of film. I would feel bad for any film student who gets have him as a guest lecturer. He does not need to be a Tarantino level of film lover, but something more than he is. I would love to see him attempt to answer simple film questions, like "What is the best directed movie in your opinion?" "What movie has in your mind the best production design?"
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Apr 27, 2014 07:24
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wins.
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Kevin Smith is also the living fantasy a lot of young boys that want to be film makers when they're 13. Pussy and fart jokes, yelled at the camera at rapid speed and mixed with irreverent social commentary on Star Wars? I too want want too make millions in this lucrative craft.
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Apr 27, 2014 16:15
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KidVanguard posted:I was listening to Smith's podcast with Jon Lovitz and Lovitz has a huge appreciation for old films and most of his humor is derived from it and any time he brings up any famous director, actor, or movie from that time period Smith has no idea who he's talking about and Jon is always aghast because any lover of film would have watched these or at least know of their existence. Smith just has no real love or knowledge of film. I feel it comes from fear but it's also the kind of fear a high schooler feels when he realizes how big the world is and not an adult with a child who has a decade long career in an industry he is actively apathetic about. Smith doesn't care about films. He cares about popculture, which only occasionally means movies. You don't actually have to have seen any films to do his job.
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Apr 27, 2014 18:02
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That's not true, half his work is about self-congratulatory mentions of Star Wars, he's seen those movies loads of times.
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Apr 27, 2014 18:19
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Yeah as someone who grew up in similar circles to him in the same part of New Jersey a significant chunk of his work is "conversations I had with friends about movies and comic books I read way too much of."
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Apr 27, 2014 18:25
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Oddly enough, he does really love Jim Jarmusch. And the influence can definitely be seen. Clerks is like if a high school freshman made Stranger Than Paradise.
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Apr 27, 2014 22:40
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I think I read an interview where he said the original idea for Clerks was heavily inspired by David Lynch and was supposed to be this moody and trippy film about all these strange characters that dropped into the shop at night but when he actually started writing all that came out was comedy so he just went with it.
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Apr 28, 2014 00:35
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Hbomberguy posted:Smith doesn't care about films. He cares about popculture, which only occasionally means movies. You don't actually have to have seen any films to do his job. That's a very shallow understanding of pop culture then as well. Old movies and actors are part of pop culture so he's less of a pop culture commentator and more of a nostalgia driven guy who enthusiastically reads those chain emails that say "Only 70s kids will understand this!!!!!!" If you love Star Wars but won't even make the small effort to understand origins in Flash Gordon serials and Kurosawa films then how big a fan are you and what commentary can you really give if you don't even know it's purpose or history? When Lovitz was talking about old movies he kept having to analogize for Smith that either the director or actors were the Ben Affleck or Wayne Gretzky of their time and I kept thinking how lovely it must be for those to be your two frames of reference.
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Apr 28, 2014 02:18
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Is there a link to this episode?
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Apr 28, 2014 02:20
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TrixRabbi posted:Is there a link to this episode? The ABC's of SNL The 4th and 5th episode are pretty much the same because Lovitz tells the same stories (he had just had a concussion earlier that day) and Kevin doesn't remember he's heard all this before, but the audience does! I should also add that in this series Kevin mentions that he never pays attention to the assistant director and is always surprised when he looks at the dailies at what his extras are doing in the background. So it's like the opposite of David Fincher.
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Apr 28, 2014 02:41
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KidVanguard posted:I should also add that in this series Kevin mentions that he never pays attention to the assistant director and is always surprised when he looks at the dailies at what his extras are doing in the background. So it's like the opposite of David Fincher. Jesus Christ. Why does he pride himself so much on his incompetence?
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Apr 28, 2014 02:51
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Because he's keeping it real and just like all of us...completely ignorant of a complex and demanding craft.
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Apr 28, 2014 02:54
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That's probably the best analogy for Smith's films: When keepin' it real goes wrong. Some of his films are more self-reflective then the others, demonstrating that Smith is clearly above all self-critical--not merely a defensive hack, somebody who never cared anyway, not like an exploitation filmmaker--such as Zack & Miri Make a Porno and pretty much all of his films up until Chasing Amy. But whether it's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back or Dogma, there's this weird atmosphere of posturing and, as some noted with the allusions to Anderson, particularly childish and laughably delusional attempt to poke fun at the pretentious egg-headery, embodied somehow by what is arguably Anderson's most thoroughly accessible film, one of those modern urban anthologies that actually works. Anderson was at a stage in his career where he was still very much into the pretense of pleasing the crowd and wowing them with the stylization of his films, but he's since graduated to a far more textural and emotionally conflicting category of filmmaking. Smith, on the other hand, insists on being this character, forgetting that he was originally out to make satire, and, consequently, he becomes like the character in a Dave Chappelle sketch that falls all over himself trying to 'keep it real,' when really he's just taking the opportunity to indulge a narcissistic fantasy in which he gets to simultaneously be an industry outsider who also gets middling reviews from a critical community that has, frankly, been too forgiving of the technical laziness and narrative stagnation of his filmmography. I empathize with Smith in about the same way as Troy Duffy, though I think The Boondock Saints is awful. Except the latter director could arguably be said to have been the victim of some pretty unscrupulous friends (who nonetheless made a work of independent art far more compelling then he ever could). Smith has been a direct participant in his becoming a proto-social network being, the thing he was always destined to be since his films aren't very good.
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Apr 28, 2014 03:58
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For all the hate Kevin Smith gets, he has only made a couple of bad movies and the rest are basically modern classics
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Apr 28, 2014 09:10
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Joey Gladstone posted:For all the hate Kevin Smith gets, he has only made a couple of bad movies and the rest are basically modern classics I'd accept Clerks and Chasing Amy as modern classics (though I have issues with both), but the rest? Dogma, Mallrats, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back... classics?
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Apr 28, 2014 10:15
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sethsez posted:I'd accept Clerks and Chasing Amy as modern classics (though I have issues with both), but the rest? Dogma, Mallrats, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back... classics? I'd definitely count Dogma and Mallrats, too. Honestly, Dogma is probably his most accomplished film after Chasing Amy.
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Apr 28, 2014 12:41
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I don't think any of those films really age well at all. Part of it is the a word pseudo-hip conservative ideas his characters spit out, and part is the horrid technical quality of almost all the films. I'd say that disqualifies them as classics.
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Apr 28, 2014 14:29
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sethsez posted:I'd accept Clerks and Chasing Amy as modern classics (though I have issues with both), but the rest? Dogma, Mallrats, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back... classics? Chasing Amy is painfully unfunny, uninteresting and unoriginal to me but I can see why someone would like it. I think Strike Back has the most genuine artistry out of all of his films, it's 'dick and fart jokes' but writ large and done with panache. Its score reminds me of a cartoon - unsurprisingly, the Clerks Animated Series is probably the best thing he's made by a very wide margin. "Why are we walking like this?"
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Apr 28, 2014 15:00
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I would say that none of them are "Classics". Chasing Amy is the closest, and it still suffers from looking really uninteresting, and only being saved by an actually interesting story. Clerks is a curiosity, Dogma is pretty good at best, and Mallrats bites.
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Apr 28, 2014 15:02
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Last Buffalo posted:I don't think any of those films really age well at all. Part of it is the a word pseudo-hip conservative ideas his characters spit out, and part is the horrid technical quality of almost all the films. I'd say that disqualifies them as classics. They were never great to begin with. Chasing Amy is a particularly loathsome film and it kind of surprises me that people here like it.
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Apr 28, 2014 19:21
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The thing about Dogma is that it epitomizes Smith's storytelling philosophy by blending it with spiritual philosophy, and the results are predictably lazy. You'll notice that there's not a lot of Bible-quoting in the film and, indeed, a major part of the film is Smith's open questioning of even the basic foundations of religious dogma, such that he essentially proposes that you don't really need to read the Bible to be a true Christian. This, of course, is asinine. It's a lot like Bruce Almighty in that all the questioning just becomes a circuitous justification for convenient credulity. Now, you could say, "Hey, go read the Book of Job, man!" Except that, in the Book of Job, the message is still essentially that you should pay homage to God even when he hurts you, directly or indirectly, because he's God and he's the foundation of your entire identity. You still have to follow all the precepts, go through with all the sacrifices, live by the text; the challenging thing to accept is not the existence of God but that God's very existence necessarily means we have to give up certain freedoms and act in accordance, not with our personal moral feelings, but with an overarching framework that, while problematically exclusive, also necessarily prevents morality from being totally trivialized. Dogma might as well be ground zero of analyzing Smith's films, because it's his The Last Temptation of Christ. Other than Zack and Miri Make a Porno, it's by far his most personal film and the one that gets down to his deep feelings about spirituality and humanity. And he conveys this by having his characters talking about their deep feelings about spirituality and humanity, and what we learn about Smith's feelings by consequence is that they're really simplistic, narrowly and inoffensively secular (he's not an atheist directing a deliberately Catholic film, as with, say, Pasolini and his The Gospel According to St. Matthew), and, importantly, surprisingly free of the demand to make anything special out of your life. I mean, that's literally the conclusion of the film: Beth is sad, so God makes her the new virgin vessel of the second coming, rather than, you know, her actually taking any of Christ's teachings and becoming one who lives without attachment to material possessions or devoting herself to serving God in the form of his poor and sick or politically disenfranchised. For all the racial humor that Smith bandies about in this film, Chasing Amy, and Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back he's visibly apathetic about social politics, which makes the message of total resignation and abdication at the center of Dogma all the more conspicuous and stupefyingly unethical. So Jesus Christ is going to come back as a lazy, post-Generation X pop culture addict. Perfect. For all the film's mockery of the overt attempts of contemporary religions to make old archetypes appealing to the youth, this is absolutely the purpose of Dogma, except that while the Church would use this blatant cultural appropriation and indoctrination to at least reinforce some already extant humanitarian component, Smith gives everyone the 'Buddy Christ' without the part where your buddy says, "Hey, movies are material bullshit that distracts you from redemption and love, give those up and follow me." This can all be summarized, of course, in the opening scene, where Matt Damon successfully convinces a nun to give up her role as a servant of Christ by doing a loose reading of Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Of course, in real life, this woman would be mildly offended by this young man's overt condescension and evident egotism, but ultimately go her own way keeping her entire theological worldview intact, because knowing that you can read an anti-religious message into a fragment of a children's story (that is itself all about nonsense) doesn't actually mean anything to you if you already accept the pro-religious premise. (And, unlike Smith, she's probably read the Bible more than once and actually believes in its importance.) But since this is the View Askew-niverse, she has an epiphany that Smith, narratively, constructs explicitly as false because SHE came to it by herself, from ONE supposed critique of religion. The entire scene is ironic, because clearly Smith himself takes some pleasure in the premise of exploding someone's worldview with a loose reading of some otherwise relatively insignificant cultural object, a trend he began with Clerks and the political debate over The Empire Strikes Back. And, once again, Smith doesn't really do anything to establish what the connection is between the thing he's referencing and the conflicts of his characters. No, we're just supposed to be in awe that someone is breaking down this thing we're aware of in a way we never thought about, except that the analysis is bad and there's no reason for it to be there. Do you want to know why it was 'okay' for the rebels to blow up the Death Star with citizens of the empire inside it? Because they're fundamentalist terrorists. That's not subtext, it's literally the text of the film.
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Apr 28, 2014 19:38
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I personally loath any movie like Dogma or that horrid movie Saved that ends with the limp, lazy message of "Welp, I'm not really sure what life's meaning is, but it probably has something vaguely to do with a monothestic god, so I guess I better respect that idea, or whatever." You can't really be irreverent if you're not willing to make the meaning of your story critical of something. Satire goes beyond just poop monsters, it's about challenging something.
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Apr 28, 2014 19:46
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Clerks is his only "classic" and it's now entirely clear that 90% of its success is due to the era and circumstances of its creation. I would still consider it a classic because of how perfect it was for the time and place it was created, and now as a time capsule of that specific time/place/cultural attitude. The rest of his stuff did alright because it resonated with a specific demographic (that I used to be a part of), but "classic" is a major stretch. Looking back on these movies, which I admittedly liked as a kid, they are just real bad. Chasing Amy once again is probably the closest to being decent because it is literally the only time in his career Smith actually tried to be introspective. It is still super offensive, but I can see people giving it a pass because it also openly states in the movie itself how Smith is basically clueless about this poo poo. So basically in a "okay yeah it is horrible but it is some dumb white suburbanite trying and to make sense of racial and sexual issues that he is clueless about, and then admitting his idiocy" kind of way.
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Apr 28, 2014 19:50
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K. Waste posted:This can all be summarized, of course, in the opening scene, where Matt Damon successfully convinces a nun to give up her role as a servant of Christ by doing a loose reading of Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Of course, in real life, this woman would be mildly offended by this young man's overt condescension and evident egotism, but ultimately go her own way keeping her entire theological worldview intact, because knowing that you can read an anti-religious message into a fragment of a children's story (that is itself all about nonsense) doesn't actually mean anything to you if you already accept the pro-religious premise. (And, unlike Smith, she's probably read the Bible more than once and actually believes in its importance.) But since this is the View Askew-niverse, she has an epiphany that Smith, narratively, constructs explicitly as false because SHE came to it by herself, from ONE supposed critique of religion. The entire scene is ironic, because clearly Smith himself takes some pleasure in the premise of exploding someone's worldview with a loose reading of some otherwise relatively insignificant cultural object, a trend he began with Clerks and the political debate over The Empire Strikes Back. And, once again, Smith doesn't really do anything to establish what the connection is between the thing he's referencing and the conflicts of his characters. No, we're just supposed to be in awe that someone is breaking down this thing we're aware of in a way we never thought about, except that the analysis is bad and there's no reason for it to be there. Do you want to know why it was 'okay' for the rebels to blow up the Death Star with citizens of the empire inside it? Because they're fundamentalist terrorists. That's not subtext, it's literally the text of the film. *bangs knife and fork on the table* Good poo poo!
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Apr 28, 2014 20:24
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Guy A. Person posted:Clerks is his only "classic" and it's now entirely clear that 90% of its success is due to the era and circumstances of its creation. I would still consider it a classic because of how perfect it was for the time and place it was created, and now as a time capsule of that specific time/place/cultural attitude. The rest of his stuff did alright because it resonated with a specific demographic (that I used to be a part of), but "classic" is a major stretch. What about Jersey Girl? Ebert liked it.
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Apr 28, 2014 20:41
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After I finished watching Jersey Girl, I recall thinking it was the worst movie I'd ever seen. All attempt at showing warm human emotion came off as forced and phony. Like it was a performance staged by a group of homunculi trying to imitate the worst family comedies of the '80s and '90s. I think it was a turning point in me starting to reach the point I'm at now where I consider all of his movies to be garbage.
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Apr 28, 2014 20:53
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Wade Wilson posted:What about Jersey Girl? Ebert liked it. I've never seen it. When it came out I was still in the adolescent phase where I loved all of Smith's other poo poo because it basically catered directly to me, so I was among the crowd that thought a romantic comedy about Ben Affleck as a single dad was essentially a betrayal. I guess in theory since I have reversed on Smith's other work I should give it a chance but I don't think I am missing much by skipping it. Presumably it is more introspective than poo poo like Mallrats and Jay & Silent Bob since it was made after he had his own daughter, so I might be wrong on the "only time in his career" thing. On the other hand, Zack and Miri was basically the story of his own life and that still didn't have much heart or depth, so I would say it is about 50/50. Guy A. Person fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Apr 28, 2014 |
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Apr 28, 2014 21:31
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No one else is making movies about man-walruses so Smith's ok in my book even if he's a bad dumb man.
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Apr 28, 2014 21:33
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It's been a while since I've seen Dogma. From what I remember, it felt like a comic book, with a cascade of heroes and villains and their wacky lore, which matches the subject matter. Shame that Janeane Garofalo didn't play the main character, though.
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Apr 28, 2014 22:03
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