Let's return, once again, to that fabled convenience store. 2022's Clerks III is nowhere near as good as the original, though it's more interesting than Clerks II. Writer/director Kevin Smith seems at first as though he's going for a straightforward nostalgia trip but then he does something interesting at the end of the second act. The fact that something really works about the film mostly makes me wish all the more that several other things about it had been different.
We catch up with Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) living their lives as normal, managing the Quick Stop and playing hockey on the roof. Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) have taken over the video store to run it as a legal marijuana dispensary but also hang out in front as they always used to. One day, when Randal is arguing about religion with his hardcore Christian employee Elias (Trevor Fehrman), he suffers a heart attack.
Amy Sedaris makes an amusing appearance as Randal's doctor and, against steep odds, he pulls through. Realising his life has amounted to nothing, he decides to make a movie. That movie turns out to be the original Clerks.
The influence of Kevin Smith's own life is obvious. A couple years ago, Smith himself had a heart attack. The most interesting aspect of the film is ultimately how this experience affects both Randal and Dante and we can see in it Smith's contemplation of just how close he was to death. It's interesting enough that I wish he'd done a few other things.
I would have encouraged him to re-cast Dante. Brian O'Halloran simply can't act and he has several emotional scenes in the film that come off particularly odd because he's working with Rosario Dawson, who's a great actress. Smith ought to have recast the role in Clerks II.
I also wish he'd gone for slower pacing in the emotional scenes and not been so busy with camera tricks. The constant comparison to the original Clerks shows that some of the minimalism that was forced on Smith due to a lower budget happened to have been what made that movie work.
I would have also recommended either spending a year working at a convenience store again or changing Dante and Randall's jobs to entertainment journalists. Another thing that made the original Clerks work is its feeling of authenticity, of coming from someone who was actually living that life. This new film talks compulsively about movie production and the inside of the entertainment industry because that's what Smith deals with now in his life. The veneer of it being about a couple of convenience store managers feels empty and pointless.
Jay and Silent Bob are still good characters. Jason Mewes has really fake teeth now that make him look slightly like George Hamilton, but that kind of fits for an aging pothead.
All in all, not a great movie but not a waste of time if you've been following Smith's films so far.
In the aftershow for the second part of Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Kevin Smith calls the fight between Savage He-Man and Skele-God the best thing he's been a part of in entertainment media in the past twenty years. Is watching a screaming, naked muscle man batter a skeleton with antlers really better than Zack and Miri Make a Porno? Well, it's a nice action sequence, though it borrows a whole lot from Neon Genesis Evangelion, among other things. And as nice as it is to see a traditional animation studio again in the U.S., Powerhouse Animation Studios' work still looks clunky with hideous colours. But the sequence does have some visceral pleasure, especially when He-Man starts tearing the heads off of stone golems. Some more blood would've been nice.
This supposed "He-Man for adults" still seems to be too timid to be quite that. In the very last episode, there's finally a hint of romance between Adam (Chris Wood) and Teela (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and it amounts to no more than a blush. So much for resolving all the old plot threads.
In terms of story-telling, it is entertaining. I compulsively wanted to see one episode after another. The best part, aside from Savage He-Man, is the drama between Evil-Lyn (Lena Headey) and Skeletor (Mark Hamill). An imprisoned Man-At-Arms (Liam Cunningham) tries to stoke the fires of sedition in Lyn who starts to realise she could get along perfectly well without the abusive and single-minded Skeletor.
I suspect the woke stuff everyone complains about on this show actually comes from executive producer Rob David who, in the aftershow, explains Revelations is about "deconstructing He-Man" and then rediscovering what's valuable about him. I guess that's why Teela looks inexplicably like Jason Stathem.
Yet there's plenty in Part 2 that seems suspiciously anti-woke. Was it always there or is it a reaction to the backlash? In any case, the plot takes a sharp turn in episode four with Evil-Lyn now in power and Skeletor teaming up with Adam. Which is, as you might guess, pretty dumb. One episode, Skeletor is massacring the city and vowing to kill He-Man at all costs. The next, Adam's allowing him to strut around unrestrained as the two try to hatch plans.
It's especially odd if you look at Skeletor as an abusive patriarch from whom Lyn finally broke free. It's like Harvey Weinstein teaming up with the police to stop Daria Argento. Actually, maybe that's not so far-fetched.
Lyn and Skeletor have some discussions about the universe, the value of power, and the dichotomy between order and chaos that made me think the writer had been listening to Jordan Peterson. The impression was strengthened when Lyn announced she was tearing down "spirituality" because the truth of the universe is chaos.
Peterson is a genuine intellectual who makes some compelling points (when he isn't overcome by his apparent trauma and occasional paranoia). Revelations does nothing to demonstrate or augment any argument because it has no internal logic. When Sorceress passes her power on to Teela, she laments forcing her daughter into the role that traps her on the grounds of Castle Greyskull. But Teela decides she doesn't want to be trapped there so she isn't. Characters just decide things and they happen, no obstacle feels like it has any weight, no adversary feels like they're a real threat, an impression not alleviated by the scarcity of blood. Kevin Smith complained the old He-Man seemed like it was "for babies" because they never used their swords. I kind of have the same feeling about Revelations.
Masters of the Universe: Revelations is available on Netflix.
Twitter Sonnet #1499
The curry doughnut formed a perfect meal.
We gathered might to switch the stream.
The cosmic weight imbues a talking seal.
We counted words to make a bigger dream.
The extra bread extends the basket case.
For never mad, the shoeless player ran.
And so began the painter's lightning chase.
Another change enlarged the rusty can.
The beefy mass obscured a billion stars.
The magic marble held a secret laugh.
Beneath the castle propped a dozen bars.
The army toys construct a plastic path.
The muscle ball was rolling up the suns.
The glowing skull delivers stupid puns.
Since Kevin Smith has unexpectedly become a hot topic lately, I decided to go back and watch one of his classics. 1995's Mallrats was usually considered the weakest of Smith's first four films, and I recognise it's not his best, but it's the one I tended to watch most often. I guess because it's his most amoral film without being quite as cartoonish as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Mallrats still had some of the gritty, '90s independent film vibe from Clerks, but there's less of the young man's urgency to Say Something. Clerks may be the better film, but Mallrats is more companionable. And, of course, now, just about any film from a '90s auteur is a breath of fresh air, coming from what turned out to be a limited period when it wasn't hip to be square.
I remember from listening to the commentary track years ago that part of the original pitch for the movie was something like "Porky's in a mall". To that end, there was some effort to have gratuitous nudity, but in the end all we have is a very brief shot of Joey Lauren Adams' breasts and Priscilla Barnes as the topless fortune teller.
Which certainly is a memorable scene. My favourite line from the scene is when Jeremy London tries to politely pretend that he can't see her third nipple. I like it despite the fact that London, ostensibly the lead character, gives by far the weakest performance in the film, a shrill, one note performance worthy of a SyFy original movie. The star is really Jason Lee as Brodie.
It's no wonder Smith can take it in stride now that half of YouTube is ranting about how he ruined He-Man. Characters like Brodie or Randal from Clerks are basically loving tributes to that kind of grand-standing nerd, who may have seemed more innocuous in the days before the internet, or maybe just the days before everything had to have dire political connotations. Brodie ranting about kids getting stuck in escalators has about the same tone as Clownfish TV. Smith, in his many speaking gigs, has never come off that way himself, and I wonder if it's his Catholic upbringing that makes him love the sinner so much but not the sin.
Brodie is much more charismatic than Randal. Jason Lee is nerdy but also chiselled, barely hiding a lean body gained from a professional skateboarding career. His line delivery takes a variety of tones and shades while also establishing Brodie as a character who will argue to his dying day that Superman would blow a load through Lois like a shotgun. In my turn, I would argue to my dying day that Ryan Reynolds completely ripped off Jason Lee's shtick.
I love Joey Lauren Adams trying on thongs right by the rack and Renee Humphrey's promiscuous-for-science 15 year-old is delightfully wrong but Smith was never good at writing female characters. The girlfriends of the leads are usually saintly--the plot typically involves the guy figuring out he's a dope for not agreeing with everything she says. Even when Smith tried to centre a movie on a female character in Dogma, she just fades into the background behind a mob of more interesting supporting characters. So it's really no surprise Teela didn't turn out so great in his Masters of the Universe.
You know, it sure feels weird talking about the relative virtues of Mallrats and Masters of the Universe.
I did think it was kind of genius having Jason Mewes play Stinkor in Masters of the Universe. But, of course, he will always be Jay.
This was a point where Mallrats benefited from only having Clerks before it. Jay and Silent Bob weren't quite as goofy as they are to-day. They were always dopes but they worked better when Jay was just slightly scary, too. In Clerks, there's always a slight hint that Jay could fly off the handle and do some real damage. There's a little bit of that leftover in Mallrats.
And I haven't even mentioned Michael Rooker, Ben Affleck, Shannon Doherty, Claire Forlani, or Ethan Suplee. Or Stan Lee. There sure is a lot going on in this movie. All under one roof, too. That's another reason it's a favourite for me. I love malls.
The film takes place in New Jersey but the interiors were shot in Eden Prairie Center in Minnesota. It's one of those malls where you can actually roam around inside using Google Maps streetview. It looks like it's undergone some substantial remodels but the Sbarro is still there, 26 years later.
Who'd have guessed a new He-Man series would be the most controversial show of the summer? If you google it, you see new articles in Forbes and Variety. YouTube is filled with reaction videos--mostly angry reaction videos. Why? Why does anyone care? This isn't the first time we've had a reboot of the 1983 series. There was one in 2002, it lasted for two seasons. No-one was particularly interested. You certainly didn't hear about it in Variety. The new series, which debuted on Netflix on Friday, is created and produced by Kevin Smith. That's something. But how many people saw or even talked about Kevin Smith's latest movie, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot?
Interest for the series really began with a trailer:
That's a dynamite trailer. It's the earnest kitsch of it, it's the attitude, it's, above all, the editing. A lot of people saw something else in it, too. An antidote to the endless string of subverted expectations of gender norms that have become, ironically, all too expected. It hasn't been long since Netflix was finally forced to end their series about a new, broad-shouldered She-Ra. Now here was Masters of the Universe: Revelation, a new series that said it was okay to indulge in a fantasy about powerful, muscular men saving the day with sexy, beautiful women. It promised to be a breath of fresh air after we've gotten used to entertainment media's unsubtle attempt at social engineering over the past five years. That's what it seemed like.
Then rumours started swirling that this was all a "bait and switch", that the show was actually going to be centred on Teela, a female supporting character from the original series, and that He-Man would be somehow sidelined. Smith specifically denied this was the case. He lied. And then he lied about lying. Which, of course, added fuel to the fire.
I'm actually not angry about Smith lying. He was in a tough spot. He had a big twist at the end of his first episode and suddenly everyone already knew about it weeks in advance. What could he do? He has a reputation for being accessible to fans. Suddenly ignoring everyone would be suspicious. I would have advised him to choose his words more carefully--don't acknowledge that people have accurately predicted the thing but don't deny it either. You don't want to spoil it for people who genuinely want to be surprised, but you don't want to antagonise people who like to try to predict these things, either. Put your ego aside and admit they figured something out. Don't insult a bunch of strangers on the internet. Because now the show has a 26% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Sure, it could be worse. It could be series 12 of Doctor Who (now at 16%). And maybe the negative reactions are actually driving more people to check the show out.
I felt like I had two horses in the race. I watched He-Man when I was little and I'm a fan of Kevin Smith, particularly his early movies from the '90s. So I had to see the thing for myself.
In some ways, I was very pleasantly surprised, particularly by the first episode, the only one solely written by Smith. It shows a strength for crafting suspense I wouldn't have counted among Smith's talents. Most of the episode switches back and forth between two developing scenes--Castle Grayskull under attack by Skeletor's forces and a party at the palace where all the heroes are blissfully unaware of what's occurring. Every cut back and forth changes our understanding of what's happening in each place and the sense of threat is built incrementally. It's really well done.
There are fireworks at the party and one of the corny jokes in the opening involves Cringer cowering under the table at the sound of the fireworks. It occurred to me the phenomenon of pets being terrified of fireworks has been a meme lately on Facebook and elsewhere which made me wonder if the marketing team for a show like this deliberately seeds memes out to the internet to help a show look relevant.
Many of the jokes in the first episode are playful in the manner of jokes of someone who fancies himself a wordsmith--when Orko traps Cringer in a bubble, he desperately asks if anyone has the power to save him. Prince Adam makes a dramatic appearance, popping the bubble with a pin, and holding it aloft he coyly says, "I have the power!"
YouTuber Grace Randalph feels Prince Adam might be somehow LGBTQ. It's possible--He-Man's alter-ego is now conspicuously the smallest man on the show--even smaller than Teela, who shows she can easily overpower him. Adam is much smaller and He-Man is much bulkier so the contrast lends some credence to the effectiveness of his secret identity.
I went back and watched some episodes of the original series (they're all available for free on YouTube through the official Masters of the Universe channel) and Teela does get on Adam's case for being lazy and unfit for battle. But this clearly seems to be part of Adam's act in the old show. In the new show, he clearly could never hold his own against Teela.
The first episode ends with Skeletor and Adam apparently dying and, just as Smith said it wouldn't be, the show thereafter becomes about Teela and He-Man only appears in a few flashbacks. Smith's bad PR instincts and woke influences aside, I actually really like the idea of apparently killing off He-Man in the first episode. I'd even be up for having Teela as the main character if it were done a little differently.
In the Variety interview, Smith says he kind of "hate-watched" He-Man as a teenager, that he considered it a show for "babies" because it was about people with swords who never stabbed each other and just did somersaults. And he's right. I'm younger than Smith so I was a baby when I watched He-Man--well, I watched until I was six or seven years old, then I distinctly remember feeling like I was too old for it. My friends and I had the same complaints Smith had--all these people with swords and they never used them, and it was silly that no-one ever died. Of course, the makers of He-Man had their hands tied by studio and network mandates about the amount and kinds of violence you could have in a kids show in the '70s and '80s, much as shows to-day are forced to adhere to diversity quotas and gender deconstruction. It's always something. By the late 1980s, I was focused more on Ghostbusters, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Splash, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don't think I'd watched the show at all since 1985 until this past week. I couldn't remember a single plotline.
It's much better written than I was expecting, and no surprise, I guess--J. Michael Straczynski and Paul Dini both worked on the show. I watched a couple Paul Dini episodes, "The Shaping Staff" and "Teela's Quest". A show for little kids, yes, but decent pulp plots. And Teela did have a big role in the old show, as Smith claims, though it's really dishonest of him to claim that the sidelining of He-Man was ever on the level he has it.
I distinctly remember Teela and Sorceress being my favourite characters. I had all the action figures and Sorceress in particular always had a prominent role in my playtime. I liked beautiful women long before hit puberty--I also liked The Last Unicorn and Splash. I watched She-Ra, too, but I don't remember it as well and I think it didn't have two seasons out by the time I'd lost interest in that universe. Even after I lost interest in He-Man, I'd still include Sorceress in the adventures I'd come up with for my toys. I had whole plots involving the Ghostbusters and the Ninja Turtles. I had the Ghostbusters' firehouse playset and Castle Grayskull and I remember both of them factoring into stories, mostly starring the Ninja Turtles.
Sorceress really gets a bad deal on Kevin Smith's new series. There's a time jump after He-Man "dies" and Sorceress is the only character who shows any significant signs of aging. Then she loses her powers and costume and she's sidelined for most of the series. After she'd looked so cool in the trailer.
In the first episode, Teela is promoted to being Man at Arms and I thought it strange no-one even asked, "Why not Woman at Arms?" In addition to making women look more masculine, there also seems to be a push to remove gendered titles or give male gendered titles to women. I thought it was strange, too, on The Magicians when Margot constantly proclaimed herself King and no-one said, "Why not Queen?" It seems like the powers-that-be decided all traditional markers of femininity are in some way weak. Which is a pity for people like me who feel they help conjure a sense of the unique beauty and grace possessed by women.
The first episode on Smith's series ends with Teela, enraged at learning He-Man's secret identity, renouncing her family and allegiance to the kingdom in one of the most criticised scenes of the new series. Her reaction does seem extreme and without adequate motivation, there primarily for the plot to happen. And in the next episode, she has short hair, broader shoulders, pants, and a breastplate that hides her breasts.
This is definitely working against the grain of the original series, which was, after all, a Frank Frazetta knock-off, coming out the same year as Fire and Ice and a year after Conan the Barbarian. Her relationship with a black female sidekick called Andra has been called "queer-baiting" because they seem like they're probably a couple but it's never directly acknowledged or explored. In fact, Andra works out to be a pretty cliche, wise-cracking, token black sidekick. Though it occurs to me Teela's butch makeover and her irrational self-exile in the first episode can be rationalised. He-Man and Teela in the old series would be taken as future lovers by most viewers--especially when one considers the fact of them even walking around together is a big step for the show's prepubescent target audience. If you read Teela as having feelings she never acknowledged for Adam and/or He-Man, then the fact that she acts in an extravagantly irrational manner makes sense, as does her apparent identity crisis related to her gender. This may not be what Smith intended--and it's probably politically incorrect--but it's more psychologically satisfying than any of the show's attempts at deconstructionist character development. Except I liked the scene where Cringer tells Teela he understands her fear because he's known for being a coward.
Teela's fear comes up again in an episode where she has to fight a demoniac version of He-Man. She claims that the fear is related to her own inner power she's afraid of acknowledging, which I think is setting up her becoming the new Sorceress. As I was reminded of by the "Teela's Quest" episode, Sorceress is Teela's mother and Teela is heir (dare I say heiress?) to Sorceress' power.
The fifth of the five episodes that have been released so far do give me the impression that Kevin Smith hates He-Man. He really kicks the fans in the groin in that episode.
Character motivations on the show are sometimes weird and without any substantial logic throughout the series. But there's enough food for thought on and about the show I'll probably check out part two when it comes out.
Masters of the Universe: Revelation is available on Netflix.
Twitter Sonnet #1456
The blistered foot could carry talks for days.
We wonder well if weather gear was free.
The horses waited, black. two mares and grey.
We settled 'cross an oil drum of tea.
They bought a donkey cheap and kept a pig.
Between the dusty mountains dinner fell.
The seconds dripped and sealed the sunken brig.
The morning school arose at crack of bell.
The extra flavour chipped the temple tooth.
The music matched the ice to make the cream.
A hundred yen could purchase tea of truth.
We added scores to show the strongest team.
The man was never heaped with heavy swords.
Computers never sucked the life from cords.
Has everyone seen 2019's Jay and Silent Bob Reboot? According to Wikipedia, it was released theatrically as a roadshow and did pretty well. I'd heard about it at Comic Con last year but I'd forgotten about it entirely until I saw it was on Amazon, free for Prime subscribers. Obviously the View Askewniverse films aren't getting the same promotion they did fourteen years ago when the last one, Clerks II, came out. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot finds Smith returning to the material not much better or worse he was. Much like the movie it riffs off of, 2001's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, it's stronger in the first half and gets overloaded with silliness in the second. This is because Smith is still a good writer of jokey dialogue. As someone who hasn't watched one of Smith's movies in quite a long time, it was a pleasant homecoming for me.
One of the really refreshing things about it, despite spending so many years being basically a very high end clerk for the likes of imdb or cable TV networks, his screenplay still feels honest. Jay (Jason Mewes) is still a homophobe who's also grossed out by motherhood and kids--like an idiot from the streets really would be. Mewes still has the ability to come off as a real hoodlum, too, with that sense of idiotic innocence that makes you love him. The film eschews political correctness in more ways than that, though. When Jay meets a Muslim girl (Aparna Brielle) from overseas, he immediately cries, "Terrorist!" and she says, frightened, "Where?!" before mentioning her name does so happen to be "Jihad". But in telling her back story of a brother who tried to murder her for a trivial reason, the humour comes from how comparatively good are the average American lives Smith's protagonists used to gripe about.
The film features the usual array of celebrity cameos and former cohorts of Smith, the two standouts being Rosario Dawson and Jason Lee, the latter reprising his role as Brody from Mall Rats.
Just like in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, he runs a comic book shop called Brody's Secret Stash and fills in the boys on the state of the movie industry, in this case on reboots. Now his store's located in the mall, which he says he's done for the cheaper rent because, like real life American malls, this one's dying. He says the only trouble he has is in watching out for Mall Rats--when Jay takes alarm at the idea of kids being around, Brody says, "No, I mean the actual rats we have running around this shithole mall." I was reminded again how good Jason Lee is and how criminal it is he hasn't been in much the past few years, especially since Ryan Reynolds lifted his whole schtick from Lee.
Rosario Dawson appears not as the character she played in Clerks II but as the wife of Jay's love interest from Strikes Back, Justice Faulcon (Shannon Elizabeth). The drama around Jay turning out to be a father isn't all that interesting, though Smith's daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, is surprisingly good as Jay's daughter, Millennium Faulcon. But Rosario Dawson, seemingly without effort, breathes a lot of life into her brief scene. I'm so looking forward to her take on Ahsoka Tano.
Chris Hemsworth also makes an amusing cameo and, of course, Ben Affleck appears, still coming off as oddly rough edged and sullen as in his Batman years. His lines are an amusing string of references to his role as Bruce Wayne.
This one may only be for the old Kevin Smith fans out there but it's not a bad movie.
Twitter Sonnet #1344
Inverted cones support a box of Kix.
Tomateless toes complete a foot of pride.
The mad reserve the roots for Harry Six.
For Henry Five's reserved the Norman side.
A tiger look replaced the bottom skull.
You see the totems here are locks and streams.
Canals constructed late of fractured hull.
You see the bullion ships would sail in teams.
Repeated peace imports a tankless lamb.
Survival sorts incumbent limbs from teeth.
Refurbished, rushed, the painter's eating ham.
Beyond, besides, a symbol claimed the wreath.
As bigger faces sag around the pool
The party blasts an e'er receding fool.
