procrastinating on homework so will now wax geek fandom-ness about kevin smith. blame his latest blog post. and the fact that i love lists.
the writing style is in homage to the kevin smithster — the only film director i ever found to be fantastically hot and awesomely geektastic. i like him even when i disagree with his views through the deepest fiber of my being. like how i can’t stand his canvas peds but find pillow pants endlessly amusing.
me and clerks:
first saw a snippet of it in the half-assed communications class i took sophomore year at ucsd (wherein i already Could Care Less About Studiosity In A Collegiate Environment — but that’s another story). had no clue what it was about; was simply bewildered at how a black and white flick about some guy eating cereal out of a hat and using shoe polish to paint a sign was garnering the kinda whoops and hoopla you’d normally find at a “young people” concert (”young people”, of course, referring to such pop musak icons as barenekkid ladies). about a year(?) later, i finally caught it in its entirety, and while still slightly bewildered, was finding a tiny niggling nugget of affection for the utter randomness of raunchy slackers. 37 dicks? cool. starwars references? double cool. nevermind that my slow-to-get-it brain needed several viewings to grok the whole death star union workers sequence. from the first viewing though, dante’s laments on his do-nothing life choices snicked at the part of me that was also slacking in all things. didn’t get it then but i get it now. i’m always in awe of people who get it before i do.
mallratting:
the kind of flick to be seen on a crappy small telly set in a crappy small college apartment. with random college people wandering about with cheap alcohol while a small group of dedicated movie watchers (or mayhaps lazy ass fucks who can’t be bothered to get up and are thus “stuck” watching whatever’s currently on the tube) laugh and make so-called smart ass commentary. all the while most likely thinking in the back of their head “aw fuck, i can’t believe i totally get that — what the fuck with the third nipple?!?!?!“. which is what happened when i rented this ridiculously wtf-am-i-watching-moments-of-my-existence-onscreen flick one weekend in junior year at ucsd. some people were turned off by the third nipple (i remember thinking only that the chick had really pretty boobies). whatevers. saw this flick only that one tiime. am still on a mission to add it to my dvd collection. and get it on in an elevator.
chasing amy:
joey’s voice still kinda bugs me. but that’s the only thing that bugs me. she and everyone else were so spot on that it was like watching the lives of people i could be meeting down the street. i loved the honesty and the sincerity and the utter rawness. a flick that starts off with the usual laughs of classic smith-liners and never fails to end on a shivering note of bittersweetness. life and all its potential fuck-ups wrapped up into two hours. plus, it’s a constant reminder that, as long as the afflicted one is given an emotionally-wretched character to portray, he will do a bang-up job that leaves you slack-jawed.
dogma:
can’t even recall when i first saw this one. rented? theaters? hbo? whatever. the dialogue in here never fails to impress me. after numerous viewings, there are parts of the flick that seem to fall flat to me but the spirit of the story (no pun intended) and the pulse of the cast interaction within the last 20 minutes will always leave me glued to the couch. the afflicted one’s crazy explosion at the end is amazing to watch. and come on…dickless alan rickman? what’s not to love?!
jay and silent bob strike back:
aside from the fact that i love cameos with a sense of humor and also the fact that the shit that comes outta jay’s mouth never fails to crack me up — this is geek-cum-idiot comedy at its best. i fucking got up and jigged along with the song at the end. i don’t jig. ever. ever ever ever.
jersey girl:
screw everyone who thinks this film sucked. heartless bastards. brainless idiots. oh but wait. not your fault you don’t Get It unless it’s melodramatic emo crying or an endless loop of explosions and/or unrealistic car battles. some of us are just born empathetic to sincerity in storytelling — and some of us (which is about 90% of us) won’t feel anything unless the truck hit you on your face. god makes all kinds of people apparently.
clerks II:
crushing on dante as always. that and how i will never be able to hear “raindrops keep falling on head” now without recalling the bumper car scene and the dialogue following it. which will inevitably lead to me remembering the other car dialogue between dante and randall some time back about, uh, self-pleasurement. watched it the first time among a geek crowd and was mostly looking for laughs in, by now, the usual smith topics: nerds, geeks, sexual taboos, general inane banter. saw this again a couple nights ago. maybe it was the more intimate setting of my telly but what crystallized was the dante/randall thread. touched, as always. more life-affirming than any lion king flick.