Director: Kevin Smith
Starring: Brian O’Halloran,Jeff Anderson,Jason Mewes,Kevin Smith
Screw the bad acting. Forget the poor production values. Never mind that the plot is barely existent. Clerks is funny. We’re talking spit-out-your-food, snort-out-your-milk funny. We’re talking exchange-lines-with-your-friends-years-after-you’ve-seen-it funny. And to think: it only cost about $23,000 to make. I won’t even do the math, but I’m pretty sure that kicks any other movies’ ass for laughs per dollar spent.
The plot, or what little there is, concerns two friends, Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson), who work at neighboring stores in a strip mall in New Jersey (where else?). Dante tends a convenience store, where he meets a stunning array of stupid people day in and day out. Randal works at a video store, a job he cares so little for that he actually closes shop during the day to go to another video store to rent a movie (a hermaphrodite porno flick, in case you were wondering).
The movie follows the misadventures of our two clerks during what begins as an ordinary day. But things go awry quickly. Throughout the course of the day, there is a funeral, a hockey game on the roof of the store, a fight, a breakup, sex with a dead guy, and many insulted customers, not necessarily in that order. There is—and this is what the movie is notorious for—much frank, explicit, and funny sex talk. Throw in a Marxist critique of the Star Wars saga (not kidding) and what you have is a comedic achievement of the highest order.
Lest I forget, the movie also introduced to the world one of the greatest cinematic duos of all time: Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith). How cool are these characters? So cool that Kevin Smith has put them in every movie he’s made since then. So cool that even though I haven’t like anything Kevin Smith has done since then, I still die laughing at every Jay and Silent Bob appearance. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please stop reading and rent this movie now.
When Clerks first came out in 1994, it pretty much blew everyone away. Here was a movie that cost less than the catering bill for one day’s shoot of a Schwarzenneger movie--and it was actually pretty good. Smith, who wrote the script, did a smart thing. He wrote a script that he knew he could shoot for peanuts. Combined with a style that simply required him to plop down a camera and shoot his amateur actors spewing out his dead-on dialogue, he ended up making one of the most influential indie movies of the 1990s.
The movie isn’t perfect, but for $23,000, aiming for perfection is just stupid anyway. The actors are clearly amateurs, and some of the supporting cast is just downright embarrassing. The movie looks exactly like it was shot on a shoestring budget. But in a way, such flaws make the movie even more charming. With its little-engine-that-could history and drop-dead-funny script, Clerks is a movie that only a cold-hearted square could dislike.
