I know the popular internet opinion is just to hate on this guy, but I legitimately think something terrible happened to him in the early 2000s that affected his films and made them all trash. There's a brutal honesty to his nineties output that's completely gone from his work starting in the 2000s. Did some executive get to him? Is it just gen x getting older and becoming lazy?
Some things we'll just never know.
why did he stay with that look? we always thought the drip was to help with the fat
He is unquestionably obsessive compulsive.
He started smoking weed
He started after Zach n Mirri, he made bad flicks before that, so blaming the weed is kind of a Cop Out
monkey drums
Huh, I thought he always smoked weed? Hence his role as Silent Bob in most movies.
I recall a video of him talking about not really being much a smoker, despite the silent Bob character, and being uncomfortable about the high times shoots because they brought in multiple pounds of weed. That was prob like 10 or more years ago though.
An Evening With Kevin Smith was basically a standup special and he said he didn't care much for weed. He began smoking when he got a hemorrhoid to fight the pain.
>Did some executive get to him?
No one is going to rape Kevin Smith
I would. And he'd like it.
Kevin Nash, well, that's...that's another story. If you know you know...
>think something terrible happened to him in the early 2000s that affected his films and made them all trash. There's a brutal honesty to his nineties output that's completely gone from his work starting in the 2000s.
>married 1999
There you go. His best movies are him weeping over a girlfriend he lost. Once he got married he had nothing to talk about
B-but the taint-brown area!
He was always lazy and became increasingly lazy in the 2000's. Admittedly he was at least trying in the 90's. I do think that he's basically a relic of those times, he's part of the gen X ethos and culture whose work hasn't aged well at all. I rewatched his entire filmography recently and even the more acclaimed 90's films he did have aged pretty badly. If you compare Tarantinos, Spike Lee's, David Fincher's 90s movies to Smith's movies, they are easily superior. They are all part of the same generation but Smith just kind of stuck with the juvenile shtick. He hasn't evolved at all from those days. He's content with just rehashing the same weed and dick jokes, pop culture references etc. He has his own dedicated fanbase which I assume is mostly Gen Xers and late millenials. They support his podcast and all that other stuff. Money wise he's very well off and he just gets to cater all his stuff to his fanbase.
At the time, I just thought it was cool that stuff like Star Wars and X-Men were being referenced in mainstream movies, because back then, stuff like that was still largely seen as childish pursuits, and anyone over the age of 13 who still liked them were looked at about the same as if someone in their teens/20s were stilly playing with action figures.
didn't we learn in the long run that we were better off looking down on those people?
No we just learned they were no different from the people who looked down on them
All I know is that I am glad that I have never been outspoken about my interests nor loud and proud about it in public. homosexualry and indecency happens elsewhere beyond sexuality.
Tarantino is incredibly juvenile, what. Jackie Brown is probably his most mature film and that was in the 90s.
Soderbergh and Fincher gives Tarantino a run for his money. They had more duds but their highs are higher than Tarantino's best.
I find Tarantino’s films entertaining but they are just too self conscious and the dialogue, which he is famed for, is tedious and all in the same voice. He got into the cartoon violence vein and a lot of his movies are just extremely juvenile and almost like American Dad’s mocking of Fast and Furious scripts (“ Brian takes a hard left, sending him flying up a ramp. In slo-mo, Dom looks up as Brian's upside-down car sails over his own. It's super sick.”).
Tarantula basically makes videogame characters with super detailed character info.
There is so much cursing in Tarantino films they are hard to watch.
I love a bunch of of cursing but his diablog goes to far off on childish tangents where humor is at least 80% derived from saying “frick”.
For such an acclaimed writer he has huge crutches as pillars of his work. It was fun watching his films before i grew facial hair.
do swear words hurt your virgin ears
It's how every single adult talked when growing up for me. I just took Frickin to be the word you placed between words to make your sentences longer
>Tarantinos, Spike Lee's, David Fincher
all these people had experience before their first film
kevin smith dropped out of film school after 4 months
clerks was a movie starring literal nobodies.
bruce willis was right about him because kevin smith literally never had a real filmmaking experience.
A heart attack from being a fat frick, emergency angioplasty so he didn't die, and picking up a daily weed smoking habit changed him for the worst.
The well ran dry quickly for this guy because he was always just a dork with no taste or genuine artistic vision. Even at his best, his films were goofy, naive and poorly written.
He tried to break out of the view askewniverse with Jersey Girl, hiring a high profile cinematographer and trying to make a real blockbuster instead of his usual indie films. Critics were excited because at the time they had been hyping him up as the next Kubrick and even put Chasing Amy into the criterion collection. When Jersey Girl came out it was a super safe by the books romance flick that he really just wanted to use as a testing ground for new film-making techniques and learn from the people he worked with. The critics flipped out over it because they felt stupid for hyping it up so much and reviewbombed the frick out of it out of spite. Kevin got really upset and defensive about the situation and went on to not allow critics at his screenings and retreated into his own personal circle where he made movies just for him and them without caring what anyone else thought. His movies after Clerks 2 have all been complete dogshit, but I really can't hate on him because he isn't trying to make art anymore, these movies feel more like gifts to his friends and family than anything else and there's nothing wrong with that.
>Critics were excited because at the time they had been hyping him up as the next Kubrick
This is such blatant bullshit, you can't find a single critic who said or wrote this.
I did
only roger fricking ebert
His daughter was kinda cute back then. Would.
Harvey told him to stop waking people up or "things would happen". It's the same reason Ben Affleck drinks. You know that reason.
>if you don't, have a look at that cozy picture of Harv, Ben, Matt and the Clintons
He stabs everyone in the back he's worked with. He stabs his fans in the back. He lies. This is all documented.
>starts as counterculture
>becomes part of the culture
>starts playing it safe to keep the money coming
many such stories
Joey Lauren Adams had broken his heart at the time, but then he got married and had a daughter
Gee, that was an easy one to figure out
I know what happened exactly.
I used to hear Smodcast. When you heard him at the beginning he had a ton of coolness. He didnt; laught at his jokes he was funny without trying. He started mocking himself in defence of his critics. The best part is to what he calls Emo-kev but emo kev is the author who actually wrote Clerks. After that he just started to listen to other people and "tried to do some popular movies or tried to be funny" instead of "art" movies. When he started "not being a serious writer" he went to shit. All of it. Mall rats, Jersey gil, Clerks 2, 3 all that garbage. The closest he returned to Emokev was Red state and after that he retreated to funny guy again. Its a shame but when he treats his writing seriously he is an actual decent writer.
It's a tough spot to be in. When he's trying his best, he gets categorized as a light entertainer, but when he accepts that label, he puts out complete garbage. He needs to be trying his absolute hardest just to make it to mediocre. That's a demoralizing place to live, having to bare your soul just to manage making a stoner comedy that's not complete shit
A symptom of ageing is becoming more morally conscious and regretful about past misdeeds. Young people literally can't conceive of this because they're not fully empathetic or socialised yet. You can become borderline obsessive-compulsive about your ancient wrongdoings as an older man. Little small things you'd never even consider come back to haunt you. That's why people like this guy appear to "sell out" as they get older.
>he knew full-well about harvey's proclivities
>still took the money
>let harvey stock his movies with young starlets that he fricked
>his movies slowly let in darker themes of guilt and self-hatred
>harvey gets meetoo'd
>harveys accomplices start getting named
>kevin has a very convenient heart attack
>all his new movies just capitulate to wokeism in a vain attempt that nobody will call him out for his complacency/participation in the whole affar
>also, his daughter looks like a frickin dude.
Oh no how horrible,nobody cares
Like you wouldn't.
Me saying "Yes, I would" is not a compliment, it's a sign of my desperation. I'd certainly never brag about it.
>24
OOF
Weird how his daughter looks more like Jay than him kek
now that you say that, i can't unsee all the similarities.
Wouldn't and that's saying something
Taint/Pink/Brown area status?
PWNED
Weinstein basically "bought" Kevin Smith body and soul during the whole Dogma debacle, where Disney tried to bury the film and Weinstein had to ride to the rescue and personally buy the film (hence why the movie is lost media at this point) so that it could be released independently.
That being said, Weinstein and Smith DID have a falling out around the time of Clerks II. Weisntein israeliteed Smith out of the film's profits, which created a ripple effect as Smith in turn couldn't pay his actors (most notably the guy who played Randall) money he was owed that basically led to a lot of bad blood and Smith shitting on Weinstein, who retaliated against Smith further by refusing to let him make Clerks 3 and holding Dogma hostage after the initial DVD release went out of print.
>tfw i still have the dogma special edition dvd that i bought when i was 17
I have that, the 4 disc one with the extra hour of movie.
I thought you were doing a conspiracy lost media joke, but Dogma really is not officially available on any streamers. Only on bootleg streaming and torrent sites. He really did piss off powerful people.
He burned himself out. He wrote too many scripts and comic books. There's a reason that Tarantino only does a movie every 3 years. Writers only have so much ink before the well dries out.
In the 90s/early 00s he was running his career. In the 2010s on out, his ultra-woke wife is running his career.
Remember that Gandalf quote about dead people that deserve to be alive and people alive that deserve death. Smith is a CLEAR representation of the later.
He gave up meat to lose a ton of weight and turned to soi for protein around 2012 - it clearly feminized him like a fricking homosexual
he failed to evolve beyond his early material because the few times he tried to do something different they weren't instant hits so he got cold feet and just went back into "Dude star wars lol geek culture lmao"
He's explained this many times. In his early films, he was writing his lived experience. Clerks was his experience working at a convenient store. Chasing Amy was his experience dating. Dogma came from growing up Catholic. By the time you get to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, you get to him making movies about making movies. Eventually he just ran out of material because he got to the point where he was simply comfortable in life and all of the movies after that point went downhill. I think this happens with all creative people to some degree, but it's particularly obvious with Kevin Smith. At some point, success becomes insulating and suffocates the creative process. Sometimes an artist can pivot and completely reinvent their own process, but most just can't.
I think he just doesn't like making movies as much as he used to. His natural pivot point was transitioning from filmmaker to podcaster. And those early podcasts were legitimately great. I think if he didn't get into weed he would have been one of the best in the business. There was brutal honesty there, and even the episodes where he was just shooting the shit with Mosier and talking about Harry Potter were really compelling radio. But then he got bad at that, too. I think it was a combination of the weed and the industry turning on him when he decided to self distribute Red State. That seems to be the moment the podcasts also fell off.
>I think if he didn't get into weed he would have been one of the best in the business
It was a combination of things, but the weed didn't help. After he started smoking every episode it became unlistenable for a solid two years. He bounced back a little bit, but he never got it all the way back. He used to be such a sharp guy. And the podcasts were wild because the shit he'd come up with on the fly was funnier than his actual movies. Harry Scotter and the whole saga of that Jesus kaiju movie were two of the funniest movies he ever made, and they weren't fricking movies
He needs Mosier back. I can't fricking stand Marc Bernardin
>Eventually he just ran out of material because he got to the point where he was simply comfortable in life and all of the movies after that point went downhill. I think this happens with all creative people to some degree,
It's sort of like how early 90s Adam Sandler movies were about a low class lug fricking around and pissing people off, offending everyone trying to be funny etc. But then post 00s Sandler movies were about a rich successful guy trying to reconnect with his kids or old neighborhood friends.
what happened is he used to travel to university campuses and give out lectures for free. then he realized he could charger $20,000 for a 45 minute speech.
Dick, balls and taint status?
Vaxxed.
He got rich
trolls remorse
zoomer here, how big exactly was smith in the 90s? was he really on tarantino level?
I still quote his movies on a daily basis.
Very big. Clerks was also one of the films that launched the independent film boom of the 90's and it was hailed critically and the way it was made (micro budget, self financed outside of the studio system). It was a huge event at Sundance.
Smith pioneered a lot of shit you see today. Cinematic universes, characters constantly talking about media, he even started the trend of Stan Lee popping up in movies. It sounds awful because all the imitators are so incredibly bad at implementing these things, but they were actually used well in Kevin's movies. Instead of Stan Lee being pointlessly added as just some old guy listening to music in front of a spiderman fight, he was actually a character introduced to pull Jodie's head out of his ass by giving him advice about women, it's Stan Lee doing this in the movie because Jodie is a comic autist who refuses to listen to anybody giving him advice in the movie, so T.S. pays Stan Lee to say it to him instead so he'll actually listen. Mallrats isn't even that good or big of a movie but that's just how influential he was at the time because of the critical buzz around Clerks
Smith pioneered the whole regular guys having a normal real world, and kind of dorky conversation in films. when the convo did not really add to the plot at all, it was not one liners or written in dramatic prose, but a regular ol' normal guy conversation for about 8 minutes. That was a novel new insane thing in 1994.
But then everyone else did it. Joss Whedon took and ran with that concept and made that pretty much all the charm of Buffy and Firefly. People having typical real world dumbass conversations with each other. Venture Brothers did an amazing job with it. MCU built whole characterizations out of it. But all of that was 20-25 years ago, it's been done to death and done better by better writers now. Two guys in a movie talking about who was better Urkel or Cousin Balki is a normal thing anyone would expect to see. What made Smith unique cool and new has been done to death and he really doesn't have anything else but fart jokes, fat jokes, and gay/trans jokes. and those are not allowed now.
Smith basically created the entire Venture Brothers styled self aware, constant referencing, meta humor
Have you guys ever seenthe movie Diner? Everybody always credits Tarantino for making characters having pop cultrue convos, but in Diner its also present in allot of scenes.
Kevin Smith, Hal Hartley and Quentin Tarantino pioneered that style and there is some cross pollination between them. At one point after Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith was actually considered the best of the 3 but his output cratered hard over the following decades. While Tarantino never re-captured the originality and intensity of Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown - his later works were still well above the industry average.
Weed vs coke
They all did the same thing,
>Average everyday ordinary nobodies having a common conversation two average everyday people would have actually had in private
No one before them was going to waste ten minutes of a film's run time with two guys talking about scenes in Star Wars. But each had their specialty.
Smith had normal dudes talking geek shit, in an era when nobody wanted to be seen talking geek stuff in public or if someone else was around.
Tarantino displayed shitty low class buttholes and criminals actually having really racist or assholish conversations these guys would have had in the car in at home.
Hartley displayed conversations by people who are not really poetic, dramatic, or good for a film at all, but it looked exactly like what a regular conversation between two people who are not actors, thespians, or orators looked like.
Every one of them perfectly hit home with a group of viewers. It all looked so genuine and not scripted or carefully crafted by a writer.
I like when Hal Hartley is mentioned on TV. He never gets the accolades he deserves. Trust is such a beautiful movie and one of the best of the '90s. Hints of Billy Wilder in it. It's up there with Chasing Amy as best unorthodox love story.
>What made Smith unique cool and new has been done to death and he really doesn't have anything else but fart jokes, fat jokes, and gay/trans jokes. and those are not allowed now.
Smith invented your favorite meta humor, zoombro. And then it got ran into the ground by hacks.
smith didn't invent anything
name me a meta humor film before 1994
spinal tap
It's a mockumentary
>moron doesn't know what parody is and what meta humor is
parody is inherently meta you absolute fricking morons
Fricking moron has never heard of parody before
zoomzoom dumbass
airplane!
naked gun/spy hard
spaceballs
young frankenstein
blazing saddles
clerks
all of these movies had meta humor
>clerks
Was somehow a meta humor movie before Smith in 1994
Parody is not meta humor. Meta humor is more trying to be real and portraying something that would be said or happen between two real world guys, but in a wacky fictional setting.
Leslie Nielson and Mel Brooks movies are straight up slapstick parodies with Looney Tunes gags throughout. If anything they are the live equivalent of Looney Tunes humor which had been parodying Hollywood since the early 40s.
Meta Humor IS a subset of Parody. It's all under the Parody umbrella. You cannot be an autistic frick about it because it's delivered lines form a character instead of a sketch played out by actors.
Go the frick back to tvtropes with the rest of the categorizing autists
Clerks was one of the big must see, always referenced movies of the 90s that everyone had to have seen at least once just to be in the culture of the time. And the fancy know it alls with deep lore insider info would tell you al about the dropped but still filmed alt ending with Dante getting shot. But it was right next to Kids, Pulp Fiction, Empire Records, Dazed and Confused, as the movies everyone in the mid 90s needs to have seen.
Mallrats pissed off more of the clerks fans by being generally wackier with more cartoon antics in it. But people came back for Chasing Amy and Dogma being Smith's first real actual mainstream big release movie.
>the dropped but still filmed alt ending with Dante getting shot.
I first saw Clerks on Sundance, which only showed the alternate ending with Dante dying. I spent years assuming Dante died in that movie and thought it was strange he was alive and well in Jay and Silent Bob.
Jersey Girl is his best film.
Tusk could’ve been so much better if they didn’t make the podcasting scenes so hokey and with terrible cgi. If they had just played things a little more seriously it would’ve been perfect.
The scene where he wakes up to his leg missing[spoiler] is pure horror.[/spoiler]
Some people just have limited ideas, a limited amount of good things to give. It happens very often.
Like if you used to be a raging alcoholic, maybe you could make an incredible movie about alcoholism because you lived it and understand it, and after that you don't really have much more interesting stuff to say. I think that is what happened with Kevin Smith, he was perfectly in-tune with Gen X at the time, but he couldn't evolve beyond that
they were all bad
go and rewatch any without the nostaliga glasses - its all low quality cringe
Clerks and Mallrats hold up
Why does he hate he-man so much?
He was too old to have gotten into it when it was big in the 80s. Smith was in middle school and high school when MOTU was in it's heyday so he would not have gotten into it or be nostalgic for it.
Also fantasy epic adventure is not even smith's thing. The guy does dorky comedy but i's all near slice of life stuff in suburban neighborhoods. It's pretty obvious the suits at Netflix saw He-Man, recognized it as some big fat nerd franchise and hired a big fat nerd to showrun it. Never once realizing that Smith is not really the guy one hires to make epic adventure fantasy stuff at all. He has never done anything like that before.
he has never made a good film
Paul Thomas Anderson mind broke him.
I don't care about his films, they were always shit, but I really enjoyed his stand ups, he was kinda like a counter culture guy but became the biggest onions studio asslicker in the world. Stared into the abyss for too long I guess.
?t=333
all of those "counter culture" guys desperately wanted to be part of mainstream culture.
What a paradox, be unknown and nobody cares about your art. Reach success and you can't make the same art again.
first one is a classic, second one is still good but the third and 4th were pretty bad since he really had nothing left to talk about.
Smith was pretty good as just telling random stories about how fricking weird major Hollywood players were and the stupid shit they would say and do.
I wonder if Smith even realizes that somewhere around 2008 or so be became one of those fricked up Hollywood types he joked about in his youth,
Is the second one the Prince one? Because that one is great.
it’s not just him, all of those vulgar gen x dudes couldn’t hack it past 2007.
Whatever happened to him he just like doesn't even try anymore. The last two movies of his that I watched were pretty much just references to his older movies with no new jokes at all
Clerks 3 was just a cry for help by a sad old man
>I legitimately think something terrible happened to him in the early 2000s that affected his films and made them all trash
He got rich.
Clerks 3 was the worst movie I've ever seen. I will never watch a Kevin Smith movie again. Not that I had seen any of them since Clerks 2. But frick, Clerks 3 was something else.
A reminder that this is unironically his best film.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was one of the most hilarious movies ever if you were in high school in the early 00s. Everyone watched it and quoted it.
This was me to a T. I do not dread rewatching it but I sense that it would be a mistake.
Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season is still a hilarious bit.
>are we gonna have a problem here…again?!
There are a lot of skits from Strikes Back that still hold up to this day.
Kek I still say “what the frick is the internet” all the time. This scene is self-aware gold and aptly describes the state of Cinemaphile.
Cinemaphile is just moviepoopshoot
I still tell people at work "You are the ones who are the ball lickers".
It's wild how he admitted to helping a teenage boy rape a small girl and the whole world just let it slide because he played the "I didn't know better." card to make himself a victim too
qrd? the frick?
smith was 100% about to get metoo'd over some shit, so this little stunt was him trying to "get in front of it" and downplay whatever allegations were about to come out.
Smith's entire career of the last decade is trying desperately to play down that he made movies that were filled with gay, trans, and making fun of women jokes with lots of breasts and ass. He doesn't want to be cancelled right fricking now so he makes the most progressive, safe, unfunny bullshit ever.
Smith has sort of pseudo admitted to this. But he admits that he spends most of his time online and on social media, which he freely admits to. So it is easy to make the connection to his being terminally online and becoming the worst version of a woke frick making safe non-joke movies about gay women being strong and not needing no man,
Well that, and he has fallen into the exact same trap of trying to attract nostalgia bucks by making direct sequels to movies made n the 90s. But starring sad middle age men trying to pretend they are still 22.
Can't wait for 10 Things i Hate About you 2! Starring a cast of boring 50 somethings and a marriage gone to shit, with wacky hijinks!
Or Friday Way After the Last Friday with mid 50s Ice Cube getting into trouble while perfectly legally buying weed from a dispensary
Or Encino Man 2 starring fat old Brendan Frasier and bald and creepy looking Pauly Shore getting into trouble in SoCal!
3 took too long to mean anything.
1 was about his early 20s just being a slacker while pretending he's going to do something eventually.
2 is the realization that he didn't do anything, but that's fine because he found worth in running QuikStop with his best friend again.
3 shits on pretty much everything for no reason.
We all know Dante is basically Smith, so homie must really hate his marriage
2 pretty much wrapped up the whole story. Dante got married, took over the Quick Stop, realized where he was happiest, fairytale ending. Anything after that was totally unnecessary. Which 3 definitely was, it required undoing every single thing in 3 to the point of making Dante some kind of misery nexus in the universe just to have a plot.
Yeah but there is at least some movie of the next logical step: raising a kid. I think that's what his base wanted. Just the same characters but Dante going through fatherhood and the kids dealing with Uncle Randall.
He went the other way either to be unpredictable on purpose or just as a frick you to people who kept asking him to make it.
I think Smith just wanted to go back to square 1 and have Dante and Randall be two single losers that talk shit and get into trouble like they were in 1 and 2. So the wife and kids have to be sidelined
A Clerks 3 could easily work, just have it be a story of Dante living long enough to become the villain.
Have Dante become the shitty boss that doesn't show up for work, levies all the bad jobs on his miserable part time employees, have him trick some guy into coming in on his day off while he goes to watch a hockey game an will not be back in town for two more days. He fricks around and takes advantage of his employees then has that moment of realization, he became the shit boss he used to hate. He sees his employees screaming about how he was not even supposed to be there that day, or talking shit about the boss and how he is definitely going to do something with his life some day, even though he has worked there 5 years. and Dante comes around with some Scrooge moment.
Yeah, I like that as well. OR maybe the opposite with Dante being too much of a pussy to do anything so he's taking his own workers shifts while they walk all over him similar to Randall.
What the frick are you talking about? He was a little boy.
I used to listen to his podcast for years, his slow degradation into Eric Butts was a sad thing to see/hear.
I would still recommend his commentary tracks he did for the Batman films and some other in 2010s.
Dude weed isn't just a meme. You can't excel if you inhale.
Its because he had a heart attack and became vegan.
And veganism destroys men.
He got a girlfriend
Nah, he just has no ideas.
Also Why does he wear that stupid hat? Why do americans do that?
he larps as a school shooter
>I know the popular internet opinion is just to hate on this guy
That's because the Internet is populated by miserable frickwits. I've met him on several occasions, and he's always come across as a decent guy. After his shows he will hang out and shoot the shit with anyone who takes the time to stick around and approach him.
I'm sure he's a nice guy to talk to, but he hasn't made a decent movie since Red State.
Fair enough.
>he's always come across as a decent guy
in your passing brief paid interactions at a con? lol yeah you sure know him well
Yes, I'm sure that your deductions based on... Literally nothing... Are a lot more reasonable. Please tell me more about the inner machinations of his mind.
sure, what do you want to know?
Why does he hang out with Marc Bernardin? Why can't he bring back Mosier?
because you touch yourself at night and it makes the baby jesus cry.
Oh, my bad
I'm not going to stop, btw. I'm just making the acknowledgement. I will not commit to change.
fair enough
Something happened to him for sure. It is called drug addiction (le """innofensive""" weed). His career derailed fast after that addiction.
why does he always wear that shitty hat and look lobotomized in every fricking picture? it's fricking irritating
someone post the kevin smith-face compilation
Body image issues. He tries to slim his face down in pictures. Same reason women do duckface, only he's turned it into a trademark
he was very dependent on edgyness, average at writing and terrible at directing.
Mallrats and Chasing Amy are garbage. Clerks is too but the low-budget '90s Indy charm makes it barely watchable.
Clerks was his one and only good film.