In the Soup

In the Soup (1992) is the second film from director Alexandre Rockwell. It largely defies genre categorization, but if pressed, I might say it was an indie black buddy comedy. That would be a black comedy and a buddy comedy, not to be confused with a comedy about black buddies.

Adolpho (Steve Buscemi) is an aspiring screenwriter/filmmaker living in a dumpy apartment in lower Manhattan. He's hopelessly in love with his neighbor Angelica (Jennifer Beals), and wastes no opportunity to tell her he wants to cast her in his next movie, playing the part of an angel. The problem is, Angelica is already married to Gregoire, a Frenchman who duped her into marrying him for a greencard he can't provide. The other problem is that Angelica barely knows Adolpho exists, and when she does notice him, it's mostly in disgust.

Oh yeah, Adolpho's third and more pressing problem is that he can't pay the rent and he's being hounded by his goomba landlords Louis and Frank. Adolpho takes out an ad and shops his massive War and Peace-sized script around town, hoping to land a producer. What he lands is Joe (Seymour Cassel), a bipolar mover and shaker whose only business seems to be making money in a myriad of complex schemes and deals; and Joe's brother Skippy, a mysteriously menacing hemophiliac.

In the Soup chronicles Adolpho's attempts to make his masterpiece film in the midst of Joe's late nights, shady deals, ambiguous sexuality, and general lunacy. Joe's mercurial moods and impulsive personality wreak havoc on a passive and shy Adolpho, and the young writer is unsure whether Joe will eventually be his salvation or damnation.

This film was the star of the indie circuit in '92. Rockwell deftly mixes influences as separate as Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jim Jarmusch (who even has a cameo!) to concoct a cinematic metaphor for remembering the value of the journey over the destination. Following the tradition of Jarmusch, In the Soup was released in black & white (though originally filmed in color), presumably to better capture the existential angst of an amateur filmmaker in Manhattan.

This film is a slow-burner, presenting complex situations that unfold at a leisurely pace, and relying heavily on character development to carry the film. It works here, mostly thanks to Seymour Cassel, who turns in a hilariously manic and dark performance as Joe. Unfortunately, there is a voice-over narrative from Steve Buscemi, and I found it as disappointing as nearly every single other voice-over in film history. Thankfully, it's used sparingly.

In the Soup builds slowly, but thanks to some inspired performances, you'll never feel bored. And check this one out for some early appearances by Buscemi and Sam Rockwell (no relation to
the director).

Plot & Storyline: 9/10
Cinematography & effects: 7/10
Music & mood: 6/10
Performances: 8/10

The Reverend says: 7/10

Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 2

The first season of "CYE" was a bit of a struggle. It came out on the short end of comparisons with its big brother Seinfeld. There could've been more laughs. Larry David was disappointing as Larry David, compared to Jason Alexander as George Costanza (based on Larry David). The improvisational style was awkward and grating, and there was very little chemistry between Larry and Cheryl David (Cheryl Hines).

Well, the second season of "CYE" (2001) has many of the same elements. The improv style still dominates the show, and it's still annoying. The show can still be awkward and grating. But there is considerable good news. The show is just plain funnier, for one thing. The writing is sharper, and the laughs are bigger and more frequent. The situational comedy, while still following the "surreal of the ordinary" path that "Seinfeld" blazed, is now its own entity. As season 2 progresses, "CYE" feels less and less like a "Seinfeld" spin-off.

Yes, Larry David's particular brand of misanthropy is brutal and grating, but he's funny enough that it doesn't matter. Yes, the stutter-step dialog is still infuriating at times. But the whole show seems to have grown somehow, to have come together to be stronger and funnier than the first season. The flaws are still there, but the superior writing and acting shine through.

Jeff Garlin is still the highlight as Larry's hilariously skeezy manager. And the weak link this season has to be Cheryl Hines. It's only partly her fault, though, as the writers have tranformed her into little more than a stereotypical counterpart to Larry.

But, all in all, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has come through on the 2nd season and I look forward to even more cohesion in season 3.

Plot & storyline: 8/10
Cinematography & effects: 6/10
Music & mood: 5/10
Performances: 7/10

The Reverend says: 7/10

Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf

Oh god. Hannah-Barbera turned in some real crap in the 80s in regards to the Scooby-Doo franchise. Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf (1988) follows The Ghoul School in the Scooby movie series. You can see my review of The Ghoul School here, wherein I judge it to be a painfully boring crapfest. Well, things don't get much better, if at all, with Reluctant Werewolf.

The movie opens on Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy (ugh) kicking ass in a car race with some souped up roadster that has the cliched bag of tricks, including extender wheels, a huge drill, and the ability to split in half. Ok, so give 'em some style points for the kickass roadster, but what on god's green earth is Shaggy doing racing a roadster??? Much like in The Ghoul School, where we're supposed to believe Shaggy as a gym teacher, we're left scratching our heads wondering why writer Jim Ryan feels the need to throw Shaggy into the most unlikely occupations. I suppose it's just another effort to wring every last possible laugh out of the "comedic" format of the show.

And as long as we're talking about the inexplicable, we might as well mention Shaggy's girlfriend Googie. Yeah, seriously. WTF? Shaggy is a bachelor. He and Scooby are hetero life mates. He shouldn't have a girlfriend, much less one with such a ludicrous name. *Sigh*. 

Anyway, moving on. Meanwhile, in Transylvania, Dracula learns that the Wolfman has retired to Florida. This puts Drac in a bind, as he must have a werewolf to complete his monster brigade for an upcoming car rally. Well, lucky for him that the prophecies foretell the next Wolfman. Yeah, you guessed it. It's Shaggy, and he's an accomplished racer, to boot. How very serendipitous. To ensure Shaggy's transformation and bring him back to Transylvania, Drac dispatches the Hunch brothers, a mismatched pair of hunchbacked henchmen who get more screentime than Shaggy and Scooby. Crunch is a slobbering mush-mouth, and there are no end to the horrible sight gags that riff off his speech impediment. He is complemented by his brother Brunch, who sports an elegant British accent and a dry wit that actually provides a few laughs in this otherwise abysmal film.

From here on out, the movie is pretty much one drearily interminable car race. It's a must-win situation for Shaggy, as he faces a lifetime as the Wolfman if he doesn't bring home the gold. Drac and the other monsters throw pretty much everything they can think of at Shaggy & 

Scooby, but the duo always manage to keep ahead thanks to assistance from Scrappy and Googie, and the bumbling of the Hunch brothers. Every single car in the race gets totaled about 15 times, but a quick fade to black is all it takes to get them back on the road. The funny thing is, a practice run on the course took Shaggy all of about 5 minutes, but yet the next day, the race drags on for what seems like an eternity.

Once again, the producers have foregone Fred, Velma, Daphne, and any sense of mystery, in order to play Reluctant Werewolf as an adventure comedy. And once again, there are barely any laughs to be had. Instead, the movie is dominated by the same freakin' sight gags and the same freakin' terrible puns over and over and over again, ad nauseum. Seriously, I vomited after the the Hunch brothers smashed into the side of a tunnel for the hundredth time. How many freakin' tunnels can there be on one race course???

If you're looking for a fun Scooby-Doo flick, skip this one and find one minus Scrappy and the awful comedy format. This one is better than Ghoul School, but only just barely.

Plot & Storyline: 0/10

Cinematography & effects: 3/10

Music & mood: 4/10

Performances: 5/10

The Reverend says: 4/10

White

White (1994) is the second film in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors" trilogy. A sequel not in plot but in thematic exploration, White focuses on the theme of equality, the analog of the color white on the French national flag.

We start off in France, witnessing the bitter yet strangely amicable divorce of our protagonist, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), and his soon-to-be ex-wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy). It's quite obvious the Karol still loves his wife desperately, and that Dominique would feel the same, but for Karol's unfortunate impotence problem. It seems like a fairly trivial thing to end a marriage over, all things being equal, but these were the days before Viagra, and French women are said to be rather lusty.

After the divorce, Karol, dejected, attempts to return to his homeland of Poland, but the courts have frozen his assets and revoked his passport. Karol becomes a ghost on the streets of Paris, living in the subway, begging, and using his meager francs to call Dominique, only to be cruelly left on the line to listen to the sounds of passion with another man.

Karol eventually befriends Mikolaj, another Polish national, and the two hatch a crazy scheme to sneak Karol back into the country. The plan is simple and brutal, but ultimately flawed, and Karol's welcoming party upon his return to Poland is anything but welcoming. Despite a few bumps in the road, Karol eventually finds himself living back home with his brother in the family hair salon. Karol soon finds a place for himself in the mafia-esque shady dealings of a nascent capitalist system, and quickly rises to the top, making a fortune as an importer/exporter and general investor.

White deals with the theme of equality in many ways, from the merely political (despite Kieslowski's best efforts to steer clear of politics), to the convolutedly esoteric. Equality is explored in a political and financial sense via the fulcrum of a Poland newly released from the bonds of Soviet communism. Poland and the Polish people are attempting to equalize themselves with the rest of Europe by adopting a capitalistic system and rushing to reintegrate into the flow of European society. This reintegration is personified on an individual level by Karol, the Polish national living in France who falls in love with a French woman. But Karol's new-found "equality" evaporates in the face of the divorce ruling from the French courts. He becomes once again merely Polish, an unwanted outsider, shunned by France and barred from returning to Poland.

On a more esoteric level, with his new-found money and influence in Poland, Karol plans a twisted vengeance upon the woman who spurned him. And what is vengeance but a grand equalizer? A man seeking vengeance is a man seeking to equalize a situation he feels is drastically unbalanced; to right the wrongs, or merely to do more wrong in compensation.

As he did for Blue (1991), Zbigniew Preisner creates the musical score for White. Undoubtedly, White's score takes on a much more subdued role than Blue's, but it is still masterfully done. White suffers somewhat from not retaining the gorgeous cinematography employed by Slawomir Idziak in Blue, but Edward Klosinski's camera work is not bad either.

White is billed as the comedy of the trilogy, but the comedy is black. White deals with themes as painful and personal as Blue's, but it is ultimately less satisfying. Perhaps the complex machinations of bitter love are beyond me, but White touched less of a nerve for me than Blue. Still a well-made film and worth a watch.

Storyline & plot: 8/10

Cinematography & effects: 7/10

Music & mood: 8/10

Performances: 7/10

The Reverend says: 7/10

Stuck

The majority of other reviews I perused for Stuck (2007) were quite generous, lauding the film as unique and the type of horror movie that America needs to make more of. I must politely but firmly disagree. First off, Stuck is not a horror movie. Horrifying, yes. Difficult to watch at times, yes. But there is not an ounce of scare, chill, thrill, or suspense in the whole thing. It would be unfair to equate this film with Eli Roth's particular brand of torture horror (a la the Hostel films), but it has more in common with that subgenre than with any traditional interpretation of horror.

Inspired by a true story, Stuck follows nurse's aide Brandi (Mena Suvari) during a night of drinking, drugs, and pedestrian hit-and-run. Except, unlike most hit-and-runs, the victim (Stephen Rea) comes along for the ride, lodged in the windshield of Brandi's car. This is just about where the similarities between the true story and the film end, as the rest of Stuck relays a story of the victim's struggle to survive that is often so far removed from reality that it's hard to swallow.

In Stuck, writer/director Stuart Gordon has taken a novel and interesting premise and twisted it into a fairly standard and mundane story, replete with a mountain of cliches about underdogs, survival, and stupidity. This movie wants to be better than it is. There are hints and little tidbits thrown out about the character's backgrounds, only to be forgotten and left by the wayside. The movie is a tad short, clocking in at about 80 minutes, leaving the audience to wonder what improvements may have been rendered in an extra 20 or 30 minutes.

Character development is a serious pitfall in this film. There's no one to root for. Everyone is so one-dimensional that it's hard to really care one way or the other. Even the victim, Thomas, garners little sympathy, and the man is stuck through a friggin' windshield! We should care. We should feel his pain. But we don't. We don't know him. We don't know anything about him other than that he's a sad sack who's down on his luck. For a guy like this, being smashed by a car would be a blessing. He seems to have little to live for and almost no prospects. So, you'll excuse me for being confused when Thomas stubbornly refuses to die. Nothing we've been shown about this man would indicate either an overwhelming desire to live or the reserves of strength necessary to extract himself from his predicament.

Brandi's serious lack of character development is a whole other matter. She's completely one-dimensional. I've never seen anyone so obstinatley stupid and unwilling to take any sort of action on a situation. She clearly would like to be rid of the man in her windshield, but is yet unwilling to do anything to remedy the situation. She won't call 911, she won't assess the situation, she won't help the man she hit, she doesn't offer him anything for pain, and she seems unwilling to put him out of his misery. So what does she do? Not much. Has sex, goes to work, hangs out. Pretty much anything but deal with the massively fucked-up situation in her garage.

Anyway..... moving on. The visuals and effects are so-so. The attempt at a slow-motion first-person shot of Thomas going through the windshield is fairly terrible. The glass doesn't break right, the pacing is terrible, and Thomas is quite obviously a big clumsy stunt-dummy. Mercifully, the gore is kept within believable limits, although the blood oozing out of one of Thomas's wounds looks more like muddy sludge than blood. And a scene in which a dog licks the splintered edge of Thomas's open fracture tibia is just completely gratuitous.

The acting is fair, given the constraints of the script. Mena Suvari's white-girl cornrows are only slightly less distracting than Jared Leto's in Panic Room. What is slightly more distracting and weird is Suvari's subtle yet noticeable forehead acne (no, it's not part of the character; it's all Suvari), although I suppose that's not particularly relevant. Brandi's boyfriend/drug dealer Rashid (Russel Hornsby) is the highlight of where this movie actually does shine: dark comedy. Rashid's street-tough exterior and cool-guy moves quickly dissolve in the face of his girlfriend's predicament, and the twin possibilities of murder and prison. Rashid is left hilariously emasculated, and his failed attempts to control the situation feel wondrously real in the midst of a hackneyed script.

In the end, Stuck's unique premise gets buried in a mountain of sophomoric screenwriting cliches and mediocre acting. Only the film's well-played gallows humor serves to make this film anything but forgettable. That, and Mena Suvari's cornrows. Man, those things are distracting.

Plot & storyline: 5/10

Cinematography & effects: 4/10

Music & mood: 5/10

Performances: 6/10

The Reverend says: 5/10

Blue

Blue (1993) is the first film of legendary Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors" trilogy. A violent car crash has recently taken the lives of Julie's (Juliette Binoche) daughter and husband, the world-famous composer Patrice de Courcy. Now Julie must try to come to grips with the sudden loss and with her husband's unfinished masterpiece which was to be the centerpoint of celebrations surrounding European unification.

In the wake of the tragedy, Julie withdraws from her former life, abandoning her husband's country estate and taking a small apartment in the city. In a symbolic last farewell, she destroys Patrice's final composition and wipes her hands clean of the whole matter.

In the French flag, the color blue represents liberty, and Julie's life comes to represent a social, psychological, and emotional freedom. She strives to live completely unattached, free of painful memories, free of social obligations, free from work. In her words, she wishes only that the rest of her life contain "nothing." Nothing to connect her to anyone, nothing to cause her pain ever again.

But Julie finds such liberty difficult to maintain. Aspects of her former life continually intrude upon her new one. She is haunted by the spectre of her husband's unfinished masterpiece. She hears the music everywhere: a street performer picks out the haunting tune on his flute, and she finds herself repeatedly awakened by a phantasmagoric crescendo.

Spectres are not the only things to haunt Julie. She finds herself tracked by Olivier, Patrice's former colleague, who has been hiding his love for her for years. And when secrets from Patrice's life come to the surface, including a lost copy of his final work, both Julie and Olivier face a horrible choice that could tarnish the memory of the great composer.

In short, Blue is a film about grief. But yet, it is such a complex meditation on deep personal pain that to say it is a film about grief is to do it no justice. Much of Krzysztof Kieslowski's early work as a filmmaker was very political, being a product of Communist Poland in the 60s and 70s. But with his relocation to France in 1991, Kieslowski announced he no longer wished to make political films. What emerged was the "Three Colors" trilogy, a subversion of political themes of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Kieslowski removes these themes from the political purview and plants them firmly in deeply personal and emotional narrative. Blue is a meditation on personal liberty. Is it truly possible? Could one truly live off the map, free from the social and emotional connections of a normal life? At what price? And what kind of tragedy might precipitate such a drastic withdrawl?

Julie's grief is not just simply grief. It is the exasperation of having to share the loss of Patrice with an entire continent who knew him through his music. Julie's loss expands and becomes Europe's loss, the loss of the spirit of unification. And beyond Julie's grief, there is the hope of emptiness. She does not want her grief anymore. It does her no good, and she wishes to let it go. But when her grief returns like a lost puppy, Julie is consumed by a towering anger at everything that reminds her of her former life. Finally, past grief, emptiness, and anger, there is.... not acceptance, but redemption. Redemption of the person she truly is, grief, anger, and all.

This film is astounding in all respects. Slawomir Idziak's cinematography is beautiful, luminous, and inventive. Zbigniew Preisner's original score is lyrical and haunting. Juliette Binoche's performance is easily the best of a very storied career. An excellent beginning to the trilogy. Looking forward to White (1994) and Red (1994).

Storyline & plot: 9/10

Cinematography & effects: 10/10

Music & mood: 9/10

Performances: 10/10

The Reverend says: 10/10

Westworld

Now, this is a good movie. This film was written and directed by Michael Crichton just a few years after he became an overnight sensation with his first novel, The Andromeda Strain. Crichton hit the big screen just a year after he helmed his debut, the well-received TV movie, Pursuit. With Westworld (1973), Crichton begins to show his range as a writer, moving away from biological holocausts and into the realm of androids and the near future.

Westworld, along with Romanworld and Medievalworld, is a fully-functional, fully-detailed vacation world available from the Delos resort company. Guests are immersed in a re-create 1880s Old West experience, and are encouraged to interact with the androids populating their vacation experience in any way that they wish. This seems to mostly manifest in the twin joys of consequence-free murder and sex.

Oddly, no one but Peter (Richard Benjamin), vacationing with his buddy John (James Brolin), seems alarmed at the physical, psychological, and ethical issues of banging and/or killing the android theme park workers. Unfortunately, he soon puts his concerns to rest and jumps blithely into bed with a robot hooker, and makes quick work of a Westworld gunslinger (Yul Brynner), gunning him down in the saloon after an argument.

While mudered androids are dragged away to park headqurters and repaired, Peter, John, and the other guests drink, cavort, and carouse to their hearts' content. But when the gunslinger that Peter killed in the saloon returns the next day and tries to kill John, Peter must think quick to dispose of him again. The gunslinger's behavior alerts park engineers to a growing programming malfunction in the andoids, but this surprisingly does not prevent the engineers from installing the gunslinger with vision and hearing upgrades and sending him back into circulation. The dream vacation turns to a nightmare, as the guests fight for their lives with malfunctioning androids, and John and Peter are stalked by Brynner's silent and menacing gunslinger.

This movie is great. Half of it plays like a Western (the fun gunfight bar brawl kind, not the boring sweeping desert vistas kind), and the other half is a sci-fi morality tale. And through the whole film, you can see the ideas forming that would eventually come to full fruition with Crichton's Jurassic Park (both the novel and the film). A complex, life-like, interactive, futuristic theme park? Check. New technology being used for entertainment before it's been properly tested for pitfalls and dangers? Check.

And let's talk about Yul Brynner for a minute. In Westworld, Brynner's gunslinger barely says 10 words the entire film, yet he seethes a steely-eyed menace and a swaggering braggadocio. The gunslinger never smiles, but you'd swear that a mocking smile lurked on his face, below his oddly luminescent gray eyes. In life, Yul Brynner was one of Hollywood's most persistently intriguing and mysterious figures. He is said to have been something of a trickster, shrouding his life in mystery just because he could. I'd like to think that some of the allure of Westworld's gunslinger is Brynner's natural mischevious mirth bubbling to the surface. The gunslinger is a man, er, I mean, a robot who would kill you just because he could and laugh as you heaved your dying breath.

Westworld is a treat for fans of Crichton's particular brand of sci-fi morality, and for anyone who has a hankerin' for a good Western, just as long as they don't mind that the gunslingers are robots.

Plot & storyline: 8/10

Cinematography & effects: 8/10

Music & mood: 7/10

Performances: 8/10

The Reverend says: 8/10

Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School

Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School (1988) is the third in an on-going string of Scooby-Doo movies first launched in 1979 with Scooby-Doo Goes Hollywood. In Ghoul School, Shaggy lands a job as a boarding school gym teacher. Wait, what? Back up. When have we ever known Shaggy to work at a conventional job? Sure, driving around in the Mystery Machine and solving vaguely supernatural mysteries is a vocation, of sorts, but I wouldn't call it a job. And Shaggy is one of the most notorious slackers in American pop culture history. And we're expected to believe he took a job as a gym instructor? Man, this is hard to swallow even for a Scooby-Doo movie. Anyway, back to the plot.....

Shaggy takes a job as a boarding school gym teacher, and you can't have Shaggy without Scooby. And unfortunately, in this regrettable time in Scooby-Doo history, you can't have Shaggy and Scooby without Scrappy. Scooby's nephew Scrappy is widely regarded as one of the worst characters in television history, not to mention the history of animation.

For starters, Scrappy is completely unnecessary. Scrappy was first introduced with 1979's revamping of the Scooby-Doo format, "Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo." Facing declining ratings and a tired format, Hannah-Barbera sought to inject some new life into the show by adding Scrappy as the brave and precocious counterpart to the lazy and cowardly Shaggy and Scooby. It was obvious that the producers had to do something to shake up the show, but adding Scrappy to the line-up was not the answer, particularly starting in 1980, when Fred, Daphne, and Velma were written out of the show entirely. The show further changed format, scaling back episodes to 7 minute shorts, abandoning the quasi-supernatural mystery aspect in favor of a purely "comedic" slant. The new short comedy format served to bring in the necessary ratings, mostly from the Saturday morning viewership of children.

But from a critical standpoint, the addition of Scrappy-Doo was an abject failure. The new format alienated older viewers, those who had been hooked by the original "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!". Scrappy's precociousness and high-pitched voice were annoying to no end, and his trademark battle cry, "Da da da da da da, puppy power!" was enough to make any self-respecting Scooby fan vomit on the spot. More insidious were the changes wrought in Scrappy's wake. Abandoning the mystery format was practically a death knell. The show became increasingly mindless, slapstick, and so boring as to be practically unwatchable.

It is under the auspices of this new format that Ghoul School operates. Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy arrive for Shaggy's new job (in a weirdly futuristic red-and-white Mystery Machine) at what he thinks is a girls boarding school but what is actually a ghouls boarding school. Hyuck hyuck hyuck, what a knee-slapper! The trio are greeted at the door by a disembodied hand and soon meet the headmistress, whose hilarious resemblance to Liza Minelli could not have been accidental. Shaggy reluctantly agrees to teach gym to the students, the daughters of classic monsters such as Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Mummy. Shaggy must train the girls to compete in a volleyball tournament against the boys of the neighboring military school. But when the girls are kidnapped by a fringe ghoul looking to harness their monster energy, Shaggy must team up with the military students to bring them back.

There's no mystery here. No clues, no flashbacks, no red herrings. The plot is straightforward and linear, and the movie tries to rely on comedy to move the story. I say "tries" because the comedy is largely composed of terrible sight gags and a plethora of horrendous puns that verge on sins against nature. But mostly, this film just feels stretched and subdued. The director has taken the premise for a half-hour episode and stretched it into 90 minutes, and things wear a little thin as a result. For instance, the volleyball match between the ghouls and the military students is stretched into about 12 minutes of screentime, every second of which is crammed with sight gags and slapstick. And while the physical humor is ramped up to an intolerable level, the characterizations have been toned down. Shaggy and Scooby's trademark cowardice and laziness are nowhere near their usual outrageousness, and even the perennially annoying Scrappy is toned down so much that sometimes you even forget he's there. Which is a good thing, but it signals a lack of effort on the filmmakers' part, and that's just one more thing that makes this Scooby-Doo movie worthy of the trash bin.

Storyline & plot: 2/10
Cinematography & effects: 3/10
Music & mood: 5/10
Performances: 3/10

The Reverend says: 3/10

Clerks II

Remember Clerks (1994)? If you don't, that probably means you never saw it because you're not interested in Kevin Smith films. That's okay. If that's the case, you can probably stop reading now. Anyway..... remember Clerks? Convenience store attendants Dante and Randal annoy customers, play hockey, talk about relationships (usually in gloriously disgusting detail), generally get into trouble, and try to envision a future in which they are NOT working as clerks. Well, Dante tries to imagine it, anyway. Randal seems more or less content to peddle VHS movies and berate customers for the rest of his life.

Well, fast forward about 10 years. Guess what? Dante and Randal are still working at the Quick Stop in Jersey. But not for long. When it burns to the ground, the pair are forced to look for employment elsewhere. Hmmmm.... now where might a couple of slackers with over 10 years of experience as cashiers find a job? Oh yeah, at a fast food joint! Dante and Randal procure some gainful employment at Mooby's, a satirical MacDonald's with a touch of Disney thrown in for good measure. The fast-food chain sports a plethora of tongue-in-cheek characteristics, including the slogans "Got Meat?" and "I'm eating it," and a horrifyingly cute calf mascot.

Joining Dante and Randal in fast-food purgatory are some old faces and some new ones. Back from quasi-retirement are the ubiquitous Jay and Silent Bob. You'd think after their earth-shaking cross-country adventures in Dogma (1999) and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) that these guys would find somewhere better to hang out than a Jersey Mooby's and something better to do than sell drugs to hoodlums. You'd think. Anyway, I digress. Gone from Clerks II (2006) are Dante's former love interests Veronica and Caitlin. One would like to assume that Veronica eventually found something better to do than hang around with a 33-year-old convenience store clerk, and that Caitlin just went flat-out insane after the trauma of fucking that old dead dude. Alas, Kevin Smith provides us with no backstory to confirm or deny these suppositions.

But fear not, the perennially ugly (and now slightly doughy) Dante has somehow managed to become engaged to the fairly attractive Emma (played by Kevin Smith's wife Jennifer Schwalbach). In fact, we soon learn that this is Dante's last day at Mooby's, as he is moving with Emma to Florida to start a new life. Never mind that he may or may not be romantically or sexually involved with his gorgeous boss Becky (Rosario Dawson). How the hell does this ugly schlup keep landing these attractive girls? Oh well, I guess I'll just chalk it up to suspension of disbelief. The cast is rounded out by the Mooby's drive-thru cashier, Elias, a 19-year-old geeky jesus-freak virgin who also might be a closet homosexual.

Okay, so this movie has been much maligned. I'm here to say that most of this criticism is unwarranted. Look, if it had been up to me, I would've left the original Clerks alone to stand as a masterpiece of low-budget indie cinema. Yes, a sequel seems a little unnecessary. But what's done is done. If you object to it that much, just don't see it and pretend it never happened. Otherwise, watch it and keep an open mind to Clerks II as its own movie. At the other end of the spectrum are those that complain that this movie doesn't live up to the legacy of Clerks. That may be so, but come on, did you really expect it to? No, this movie is not Clerks. It's different. It's shot in color, the actors are aging, and they're not at the Quick Stop anymore. But that's the whole point of the movie. We are not supposed to idolize Dante and Randal. Sure, they're intelligent geek slackers who get into crazy situations. But look deeper and you see two burn-outs who've been working the same shitty jobs in the same shitty town for over a decade of what should have been the best years of their lives! They're not cool. They're horrifying, and they portray a situation that is all too real for many people in Jersey and across the country. So everybody just needs to realize that this movie is not as "cool" as Clerks because it's not supposed to be. Because there's nothing cool about 33-year-old fast food cashiers.

But this movie is funny. There's no denying that. Kevin Smith employs the same skewed wit as with many of his other movies, and if he's prone to the occasional clunky quasi-philosophical soliloquy, I for one will forgive him. There are a few stutter-steps. Schwalbach's portrayal of Dante's fiance Emma is..... odd, to say the least. And a spontaneous 80s-style choreographed dance number falls particularly flat. But the laughs are there, coming mostly from old stand-bys like Jay and Randal, but also from the relatively unknown Trevor Fehrman as Elias the jesus geek. Possibly gay and obviously sexually repressed, Elias's naive account of his continued virginity at the hands of his girlfriend's "pussy troll" is freakin hilarious.

So, it's not Clerks, but in terms of Kevin Smith movies, it's easily in the top 3 or 4.

Plot & storyline: 7/10
Cinematography & effects: 6/10
Music & mood: 6/10
Performances: 9/10

The Reverend says: 7/10