![]() There’s more heart in “Jay & Silent Bob Reboot” than Smith has ever put on screen before, and an endearingly transparent sense of family that goes far beyond the meta, pop culture-heavy nature of the material. He can be critical of Hollywood because he did his time there and he can be critical of himself, but he also deserves to celebrate his survival. ![]() But by raising the money for his movies himself, by controlling their release and going on tour with them, Smith ended up being the maverick holdout of the late 80s/early 90s indie boom he was initially part of. “Red State,” “Tusk” and “Yoga Hosers,” all horror films to varying degrees (and increasingly bizarre to say the least), proved that he was capable of being successful out of the comfortable box he was known and loved for. Show them it doesn’t bother you and you win.Īs a filmmaker, I think Smith functioned best when completely removed from the world of recurring characters he created decades ago. Show the hater tots that they can’t hurt you by hurting yourself before they get a chance. What Smith is doing is a technique very familiar to fellow nerds and geeks. This is his first film since, and, in many ways, feels like he pulled out all the stops in case it ends up being his last. And unlike the John Hughes-influenced moments of introspection cut into the raunchy comedy in Smith’s past work, there’s a dynamic presence here that we’ve never seen before, likely due in part to Smith’s real-life heart attack in 2018. Longtime fans won’t be surprised by the way the film is structured, but having the road movie plot be secondary to the main story about the relationship between Jay and Falcon speaks of the confidence the writer-director had with the performance abilities of Quinn Smith and Mewes, who have true chemistry and sincerely great dramatic chops. When it is revealed by Falcon’s mother, Justice (Shannon Elizabeth) that Jay is the biological father, Falcon and her gang (Treshelle Edmond as Soapy, Aparna Brielle as Jihad and Alice Wen as Shan Yu) accompany them out West on the condition that Jay doesn’t tell Falcon who he really is. ![]() It’s a mirror of the plot to “Strike Back,” but with an important twist that introduces a group of young female characters, lead by Smith’s own daughter, Harley Quinn, as Millennium Falcon. “Jay & Silent Bob Reboot” is the 8th big screen outing for the title characters (played by Jason Mewes and Smith, respectively) and serves as a social media age follow-up to 2001’s “Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.” After their latest bust for selling pot, the duo are tricked by a shady lawyer (Justin Long) into signing away their names and likeness to a Hollywood production company and make their way from New Jersey to California to seek justice. In between the drug references, celebrity cameos and sex jokes are Smith’s most genuinely moving dramatic moments. It’s for that reason that his latest film, disguised as a self-deprecating cash-in on his two most popular characters, turned out to be the best movie he has made in the foul-mouthed, self-referential “Clerks” cinematic universe. Over the years, from the breakout success of his self-financed 1994 debut feature “Clerks” through his ventures into big studio films and back again, no middle-aged fanboy has put Smith’s every move under the microscope more often than he has. The only endlessly opinionated old geek that is more obsessively critical of everything Kevin Smith does is Kevin Smith.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |