Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List

Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #361: Clerks

One of the movies that re-defined independent cinema in the United-States during the early 1990s, “Clerks” marked the arrival of New Jersey filmmaker Kevin Smith. It also marked a new trend in movies geared towards large audiences: characters that actually speak the way ordinary people talk. The characters in Quentin Tarantino films often riff on pop culture, but that is usually before they end up shooting someone. The characters in Kevin Smith movies also riff on pop culture, but they hold ordinary jobs in the real world. In his 1994 feature film debut, his characters hold the most ordinary jobs in the western world: clerks at a mini-mart.

I was way too young to see this movie when it first came out, but I eventually ended up watching in what is, lets face it, the ideal location to watch a movie like this: my mom’s basement with my older brother. Of course my mom had zero interest in this movie, but my brother and I laughed our ass off and had a great time. I am pretty sure it was the first time I ever saw movie characters discuss the moral implication of killing everyone on the Death Star in “Star Wars” only to have a private contractor chime in on their conversation and compare the event to the time he did construction work at a mobster’s house.

Set in a Quick Stop convenience store in Leonardo, New Jersey, “Clerks” stars Brian O’Halloran as Dante Hicks, who is called in to work on his day off. His day shows no sign of improving after he arrives at work as he discovers someone has jammed the locks to the store’s security jammers with chewing gum, leaving him no other option than to put a huge sheet over the doors with the message “I assure you, we’re open.”

His work neighbour is Randall Graves (Jeff Anderson) who works at the video store, a near-extinct establishment nowadays. Dante and Jeff have a mutual dislike for their jobs, having to endure customers asking questions like “what kind of movies do you have?” They prefer to close their stores for any reason such as playing hockey on the roof, or going to the funeral of one of Dante’s ex-girlfriends, with disastrous results in both cases.

As the day goes by Dante questions his place in the grand scheme of things, wondering why he is wasting his early twenties working as a clerk. His current girlfriend Veronica (Marilyn Ghigliotti) also believes he is wasting his life and needs to change. Adding to his misery, Dante learns from the local paper that another one of his ex-girlfriends is moving on with her life by getting married.

Also in the mix are Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith), two slackers selling marijuana outside the store. This would-be dynamic duo has appeared in most of Smith’s comedies, eventually getting their own movie in 2001 with “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.” Despite the fact the Silent one almost never speaks, over the years they actually end up going on more adventures than Dante and Randall.

The lives of these characters is a story about ordinary men stuck in a rut and afraid they have nowhere to go. They discuss the wondrous adventures they have seen in movies and TV, but their own lives are stuck in neutral. No wonder the film resonated with so many young people with it first came out. Times may have changed since the 90s, but the worries are still the same.

In terms of the movie’s humour, I have noticed many of Kevin Smith’s comedies have at least one scene of cringe-inducing disgust, one scene that will make you go “holy shit, what did I just see?” In “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” a woman defecates on a man’s face. In “Clerks II” a man has (I am hoping) simulated sex with a donkey. Smith’s directorial debut also did not miss a chance to shock audiences when a female character goes into a bathroom to have sex with her boyfriend, only to realize the only person in the bathroom was a dead man who was busy with some adult magazines before going into the great beyond. It is incredibly crude, but you have to admire the level of imagination involved with coming up with such crudity.

Recently Smith has announced he plans to retire his film career after shooting “Clerks III.” Why not? He may as well finish right back where he started. My only question is this: what disgusting scene will he come up with this time?

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

Simon's Movie Reviews

Search This Blog