2021 Directed by Malcolm Ingram
A look at Kevin Smith's life and career from his childhood in New Jersey, to the day they cemented his footprints at the world famous TCL Chinese Theater, with a flock of famous folks testifying on Silent Bob's behalf!
Kevin Smith Jason Mewes Scott Mosier Penn Jillette Stan Lee Brian O'Halloran Richard Linklater Grace Smith Betty Aberlin Joey Lauren Adams Ben Affleck Marc Bernardin Raquel Castro Matt Damon Lily-Rose Depp Walt Flanagan Ralph Garman Trevor Groth Bryan Johnson Justin Long Judd Nelson Vincent Pereira Janet Pierson John Pierson Joe Quesada Brian Quinn Jason Reitman Michael Rooker Jennifer Schwalbach Smith Show All…
Clerk: A Documentary about Kevin Smith, Clerk.
With Abel Ferrara’s Zeroes and Ones sitting right there, I decided instead to watch this hagiographic documentary about Kevin Smith. Sorry folks, it’s been a hard year and I needed something easy tonight. Anyway, like many white male teenagers of the early- to mid-2000s, I grew up loving Clerks and Chasing Amy before viciously disavowing both them and their maker early in my college years. Now, at age 32, I’ve arrived at the mature, adult position on the issue of Kevin Smith, which is: not a very good filmmaker, but wow, people are still watching Mallrats and maybe that has to count for something. And hey, look at me – I don’t even like his movies, and here I am…
It's impossible for me to look at this from an unbiased perspective, so I won't even attempt to present one. Snowball Effect will likely always remain the quintessential Kevin Smith biography, but this funny and moving deep-dive is a wonderful summary of the man's life, work, and philosophy. Although Malcolm Ingram has been and remains a skilled documentarian, Clerk becomes more than a documentary when—with the exceptions of the new interviews—every anecdote, image, and piece of footage is not only familiar but also has some direct correlation with a period of my own coming-of-age. Hell, Smith's latter-day "be the most me I can be" approach to things is half the reason I started writing capsule reviews again. If my inevitable Clerks III essay winds up having more to do with my personal life than with the film itself, well, don't say I didn't warn you.
A nice retrospective on the life and career of someone who we pretty much know everything about already, now just stitched together chronologically. It's nice seeing some of the old familiar faces like Mosier floating around, and it's cool that so many of the actors from across Smith's filmography, big and small, are more or less all here. But goodness, I wish they were able to make this a brisk 90 minutes.
My biggest problem is that it's two hours and covers every single one of his films. You get the sense, considering what little there is said about the films from Cop Out onward, that a lot of that could've been condensed or even skipped over. Even the best…
I once knew Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier and their frequent DP David Klein and shared many conversations with all of them, mostly before Smith became famous and so influential. I even skipped class to see Basic Instinct with Kevin and Scott on the day it opened. Kevin had a huge laserdisc collection and I remember we both bought JFK at the same store. The discs were notoriously defective. Scott once drove me home and revealed a cool hobby of recording movie dialogue onto audio cassettes so he could listen to them in the car. I think he was playing either Moonstruck or Hannah and Her Sisters in the background.
Kevin and Mosier introduced me to the "Six Degrees of…
"It's important to be a fan of yourself...I'm proud to be a Kevin Smith fan you know" -Kevin Smith.
- 2021 Ranked: boxd.it/aL2Ys
I'd probably rather watch Gigli.
It's a vanity film about a director who people have been clamoring for for decades but who I think only has one good film. I don't really care for Kevin Smith's films, although he seems nice, and this documentary didn't help much. It's one of the more sterile, surface level docs I've seen in a while. Even with limited knowledge about Smith outside of his films I found almost no new information here. This is a shame because I think there are interesting takes that could be made on Smith's career and impact but instead we just get his wikipedia entry stretched out to nearly two hours.
It's a pretty basic documentary but there are emotional beats that die hard Smith fans will likely enjoy.
I could listen to Kevin Smith talk non-stop all day. The guy is so brutally honest and eloquent and funny and charismatic and just wears his truth on his sleeve in the most refreshing of ways.
I'm not a diehard fan of his work, nor have I really followed his career since the late 90s, but I've always respected the hell outta the guy and considered him to be one of the most critical voices of my generation. CLERKS was one of the earliest entry points I had into the world of independent cinema. It became a cultural touchstone for many my age, a subversion of the snooty arthouse aesthetic that wasn't at all serious, but to the contrary fucking…
There are some bizarre editing and producing choices made here, but Ingram mostly understands the type of Behind the Music formula that creates tension even when certain career moments aren’t THAT dramatic. I enjoyed watching the movie.
Its interest in certain actors and not others is odd, opting for spotlighting George Carlin while not mentioning Michael Parks and John Goodman in its Red State segment. It’s weird that Weinstein is addressed but not Johnny Depp, as Weinstein bankrolled the first half of Smith’s career, with the 2nd half fueled by podcasting, bringing in the world’s biggest movie star at the time to say the word “podcast” on screen in Tusk, legitimizing the art form in the movie about podcasters, written on a podcast.…
SXSW 2021
I am a huge Kevin Smith fan and watching this documentary was like reliving my whole life. If you care about Kevin Smith's films, want to know how he met Jason Mewes, and what his inspirations were, definitely check this out. His films have been protested by the Catholic Church and Westboro Baptist Church. Smith donate royalties from Weinstein projects to Women In Film.
Vegan points:
Kevin Smith went vegan after suffering a near-fatal heart attack.
says a lot that a comprehensive Kevin Smith doc even glosses over Cop Out
Man, I don’t even *like* the Springsteen song My Hometown but as soon as it started playing, the tears FLOWED lmao (as they should when one is watching the life story of Hollywood’s easiest crier, Kevin Smith)
I wish the doc were a little bit better made and a bit longer. They FLY through his early years and Clerks, but if you want a better version of that part of his story, check out The Snowball Effect doc from 2004 (trigger warning that h*rv*y w**nst**n is interviewed in it).
The thing about the Springsteen song in the beginning, besides my tears, is that my thought was, “OH WOW - they had a big budget for this! I’m about to see…
Pretty fun watch. Lots of interesting interviews and just plenty of old footage. I can’t help but admire what the man has achieved, even if I think it’s cringey that he cries about a line he put into his own movie or even if I haven’t seen half his work and have no intention to.
I’ll watch anything he’s done with Ben Affleck in it and thankfully there is some Affleck input here. Solid documentary but could’ve been trimmed down a bit.
