Linkstew

On Wednesday night we listened to Kevin Smith answer questions for five hours before we finally couldn't take it anymore and left.

Now don't get me wrong -- the "it" I couldn't take certainly wasn't Kevin himself, because he's one damn funny man. Rather, what I couldn't stomach was all the fanboys (and girls) creating some truly awkward moments with their poorly thought out and unrehearsed questions. Now I grant it might be a little obsessive to rehearse a question, but given that you had to plan in advance to buy a ticket in the first place, you might as well plan your damn question in advance too. And I guarentee all these people saw An Evening With Kevin Smith, so I can't help but wonder if they realized that their poorly thought out questions made them "that guy" that made you squirm while watching the DVD.

Highlights of the evening that I remember were:

• Kevin clearly found the signers on stage novel. Extra funny was that he didn't notice the first time they swapped, so when he turned and saw a new person sitting there, he was visibly startled.
• The Jewish girl who goes to a Catholic high school in Oakland (because public schools in Oakland = no good). Kevin was fascinated, and was asking her a lot of questions about how that works.
• The guy from New Zealand who sounded like Kermit. Once Kevin pointed out his voice, everyone couldn't help but laugh every time he tried to finish asking his question. It was kind of mean, but fucking funny. After answering the question, Kevin sang a bit of Rainbow Connection.
• I was amazed by the scope of his potty mouth. It gave me something to strive for.
• Kevin was also amused by the Berkeley/Stanford rivalry, and by the NorCal/SoCal rivalry, and especially amused by the idea of LA stealing "our" water. "Do they really steal your water? I've never heard of that before," he said. "You're all Californians to me," he said.
• Apparenly Jason Mewes had sex with 27 women in a month. "If I knew all it took was starting a conversation with 'How you doin''? and ending it with 'Snooch,' I would have been all over that a long time ago.
• Apparently, Jason Mewes is also living clean now, and he's moved into a house with some other clean living people named "The Falcon's Nest."

It took me awhile, but I think I figured out how Kevin deals with the stupid questions:

1. Someone paid him a whack of cash.
2. He makes a moderate amount of fun of some of the people who ask the really stupid questions, so that's probably entertaining for him.
3. If they're really stupid, then he can put them on a DVD, in hopes of both making the person feel like a real idiot, and in hopes of having that serve as a warning to dissuade future idiots from asking the same stupid questions.

Clearly 3 doesn't work in practice, so I guess he has to focus on 1 and 2. I would be curious to hear his internal monologue during the Q&A, though. "Oh damnit, not this question again." "Oh damnit, this fucker already asked me a question."

The straw that broke the camel's back was this: The girlfriend of the guy who asked the first question got into line after her boyfriend asked his question, so it was 4 or 5 hours later that she made it to the front of the line. She asked some stupid question, and then followed it up with a request for a kiss. "What!?" "My boyfriend's cool with it. He's sitting right there." And after she sat down, her boyfriend got back in the line to ask another question.

As it happened, though, we apparently left about 10 minutes before Kevin called it quits, and we missed someone ask him what his favorite bird of prey was. "What, like from the comic book?" he asked. "Wait, did you say you were a falconer?" Heh.

Honestly, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was my least favorite Kevin Smith to date. Which isn't to say that I disliked the movie. I enjoyed it a lot, and I laughed throughout, and the innumerable references to the other movies felt like a treat in every scene. But unlike Smith's other movies, there just weren't any redeeming qualities to be found. There were plenty of jokes, and I believe I laughed at every one of them. But the question is, how long is it possible to get laughs out of dick and fart jokes from a pair of idiots? And of course, Kevin Smith realized the answer is "not much longer," and so he packed them all the low brow jokes he possibly could into this movie about a couple of fools.

My biggest complaint is probably that the movie kind of trailed off at the end, and didn't offer much closure on the characters. And that's not a very big complaint, because I'm sure that when the special edition DVD of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is released, there'll be plenty of reminiscing and closure to be had. But where there wasn't closure, there was plenty of self-referential humor, which I'm a pretty big fan of.

It's a tough call, but yes, I liked Mallrats better than Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. For starters, Mallrats had a much more coherent, focused story, while Jay and Silent Bob get distracted and are all over the map. Second, there's one notable scene in Mallrats that I felt was funnier than anything in all of Jay and Silent Bob. And finally, Mallrats had very nice closure in the end, and I'm a sucker for closure. Of course, Dogma, Chasing Amy, and Clerks are in a whole other league, and I'm not even going to discuss them in comparison to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

And yes, I'm such a geek that the first thing I did when I got home was pull out my copy of Chasing Dogma to attempt to reconcile the timeline in my mind. And yes, I noticed all the Apple placements. Holden had four Macs in his studio!

Will you like this movie? If you liked any other Kevin Smith movie, you almost certainly will. It's most like Mallrats, but it's not the same sort of movie at all. Other than that, if you're any sort of fan of comedies with very straightforward humor, you should be able to enjoy this even if you don't catch the multitudinous viewaskewniverse references.

And again, just because it was my least favorite of the five movies doesn't mean that I didn't like it. I did like it, and I laughed a lot. I just liked it less than four other movies that I like a lot. 3.5/5.

From the sounds of this message which Kevin Smith posted to the Viewaskew forums, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (the latest movie in the Viewaskewniverse), is going to be very, very good. And that's not just Kevin saying it's going to be good -- It's Kevin saying that the movie was very well received by the audience at the test screening. I had doubts that they were going to be able to effectively use the monster cast they've got lined up, but all doubts have vanished from my mind, and I'm eagerly anticipating seeing this movie come August.

So I went to the theater to see Dogma, and I sat down in a pretty good seat close to the middle of the place, and I looked forward, and saw a Chasing Amy sticker on the seat in front of me that looked like it'd been there for quite some time.

So three days after Tyler M. Roscoe (Purveyer of the Squelch) sent a message to misc that asked "[True or False] The setting of John Hughes' movies in the suburbs of Chicago is an institution." Don't get it? Go see Dogma. Just do it.

And then, wouldn't it figure that when I was walking back from Dogma, I walked past not ONE, but TWO cars with New Jersey licence plates. And it wasn't even like they were close to each other. One was making a left turn onto Telegraph from Bancroft, and the second one was parked in front of the Durant Food Court.

I saw Dogma in the afternoon, and then in the evening I saw South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. Then, after I got home, I read Ebert's Review of Dogma, and it ends with the line "[And the movie] goes so far as to suggest that God loves them. And is a Canadian." (Alanis Morissette plays God in Dogma, and she's Canadian. I knew this, but didn't remember until I read Ebert's statement.) To Fully appreciate this, you'll have to have seen the South Park Movie.

I've been killing time all afternoon, waiting for 5, so I can leave and head to Bakersfield/Kern Valley/whatever. I played some Q3 and tweaked with the graphics settings trying to make it go faster. It didn't go too much faster, even stripped of it's beauty, so I left it at the better looking settings, as it is still playable.

I drank some apple juice.

I pondered "Chasing Dogma" for awhile, which is a spiffy comic. I looked at the Clerks and Mallrats DVD's that I just got, which look promising. Ohh.. I love deleted scenes!

I cleaned up the pile of boxes a little that was sitting by the fridge. I packed. I packed some more.

I read Slashdot, and kept refreshing in hopes of an interesting article being posted. I wonder why they wouldn't post my news about Myth: Chimera... Bastards.

I read a letter/note thing from Grandmommy that I got in the mail.

And finally I came to write a bried update on the page... Now.

I enjoyed Dogma a lot. Unfortunately, I can't remember a lot of it, because right after I saw Dogma, I saw South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. I enjoyed South Park, too. In fact, the only thing I didn't like about South Park was Stan's vomiting. It wasn't funny the first time. Perhaps my favorite part of the move was the song "What would Brian Boitano Do?" Sheer Genius!

As far as Dogma goes, I really liked it. Funny, and it offered ideas. Just as expected, of course. My only gripe was that it was rather violent, but I shrugged it off and got on with my life. I'm probably going to see it at least twice more. I'm supposed to see it with Keith and Michael at some point, and then I'm going to take my brother to see it when I'm in Bakersfield...

Dogma, Kevin Smith's next movie, which I've been waiting on forever, is finally coming out. Tomorrow. This surprised even me, because I've been so busy. So I'm going to see it. Tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it. You should be too.

"I've known you forever,
you two just met."
--Soul Asylum, "We 3"

This, the third movie in Kevin Smiths Viewaskewniverse staring Jay and Silent Bob doesn't quite feature the Dynamic Duo as much as Clerks or Mallrats, but the scene in which they stare is easily one of the most amusing of the countless great scenes found in this movie. While the sanctity of the Jay and Silent Bob scene is sullied somewhat by the events which follow, the movie in its entirety is a masterpiece, and easily the most meaningful of the trilogy. And even if the emotional story weren't enough to make me love this movie, the score by Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum, along with the inclusion of "We 3" playing over the credits, would have been enough to get me to watch this movie over and over and over.

Buy Chasing Amy now from Amazon!