These days, more than ever, personal filmmaking deserves to be celebrated simply because it reveals itself. This doesn’t mean that personal filmmaking can’t be done in a confusing way.
Since his first feature film, the very low-budget black-and-white Clerks (1994), writer-director Kevin Smith has only made films about himself. He is not only himself as a person, but also himself as a sensibility. In “Clerks,” he delivered it perfectly. In “Clerks III,” his second sequel to the film, he is less dexterous.
Paradoxically, part of this is due to Smith’s relative maturity.husband and father heart attack survivor Now 52, he thinks about more than being a sage. Instead of following up the 2006 film Clerks II with its blasphemous, fanatical absurdity of its pictures, he revives Dante and Randall, Jay and Silent His Bob, and does some inventory.
The movie is bouncy at first, but actors Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson, who were raw and naturalistic in their previous films, look like they’re doing a little better here. The three words that characterize the third degree aren’t interesting enough. As in, the new character is called blockchain. It’s funnier than that character called Podcast in the latest “Ghostbusters” movie, but you know.
Randall has a heart attack and realizes he has to do something with his life and decides to direct a movie. Yes, about working at a convenience store. Despite the star-studded audition scene (Ben Affleck! Danny Trejo! Freddie Prinze Jr.!), it’s often just as unfunny as it is uninteresting.
Smith has often broken the fourth wall with his pictures, but here he goes to the big-time meta with a plot to make a movie. But his meta ideas can’t separate the difference between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the French New Novel. It’s like pinball on a machine trying to get into tilt mode.
At one point, for example, Smith-played trench-coat Silent Bob breaks character and, as filmmaker Smith, lectures Randall about the horrific color scheme of the shot he’s framing. The joke doesn’t work just because Smith’s visual mode is seldom mistaken for the “red shoes” visual mode.
The wobbly ending combines a confusing and often talkative metamode with Nicole Kidman’s compelling emotion. AMC Theater PromotionDespite my persistent interest in Smith (full disclosure: I’m also a wise Jersey boy), it daunted me.
Clerk Ⅲ
Designated R. It’s a Kevin Smith movie. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. at the theater.