Clerks Movie Discussion and DVD Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing okay. Today I'm here to talk about Kevin Smith's 1994 debut film, my history with Kevin Smith's films, and the DVD release, which I got last week. So, let's get into it and talk about Clerks!

 A few months ago I picked up Mallrats on Blu-ray and I also got it on VHS at Ottawa Comiccon. However, Clerks is a very different movie than Mallrats is. Probably because Clerks was made so independently and is much cruder than Kevin Smith's later films in terms of how it was made. The movie was filmed in black and white, which is probably the filmstock that Smith could afford in the early '90s when he was making this movie, being that filmmaking was still analogue, even if visual effects were starting to become digital. Of course by the time Clerks was being made, black and white movies weren't as common as they had been from the late 1800s (the dawn of film) to the early 1960s, when colour film was deemed too expensive for most studios to use, so it was a pretty unique choice to film this movie in black and white.

I really enjoyed watching Clerks. I've heard about it for so many years, yet I never got spoiled on the actual events in the movie. Not even by Mallrats. I don't really have a favourite character, but obviously I was excited to see the beginnings of Jay and Silent Bob, played by Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith. Mainly because of when I first encountered them and how I first encountered them. I loved Veronica (Marilyn Ghigliotti) as a character, but I wish she'd been in it more. I think it's because I saw Mallrats first and Brandi (Claire Forlani) and Rene (Shannen Doherty) played a much larger role in that movie than Veronica and Caitlin (Lisa Spoonauer) play in this movie, so I was anticipating that Dante's girlfriends, both present and past, were going to play a bigger role than they did.

I was surprised by the scene where Dante and Randal are talking about the contractors who potentially worked on the Death Star in the Star Wars franchise. I wasn't surprised by the scene, because in an issue of Star Wars Insider magazine from 2007 that had an article on the novel, Death Star, in it, they mention that scene. However, I was surprised because I'd forgotten that the article mentions that Dante and Randal are talking about the second Death Star from Return of the Jedi, not the original Death Star from Star Wars. I just looked up that article, and reread the first couple of lines which talks about the scene from Clerks before going on to the topic of the article.

My introduction to Kevin Smith actually came from the DVD for Spider-Man in 2005. I'd owned the movie on VHS but I'd gotten the DVD for Spider-Man 2 for my birthday or Christmas in 2004. So a year later, I picked up the DVD for the 2002 movie since I'd just gotten my first DVD player, which was a portable one. Kevin Smith is interviewed in the bonus feature covering Spider-Man's history and people's love of the character on the second disc. 

My next encounter with Kevin Smith came in the form of his guest role in season 5 of Degrassi: The Next Generation where he played a fictional version of himself, making a new Jay and Silent Bob film that gets filmed in Degrassi Community School. within the fictional movie, he also plays Silent Bob. This was actually my introduction to Jason Mewes. After this I've mainly encountered him through his work as a writer on the Green Arrow comic (reading it in trade of course), and as a director on several episodes of The Flash, Supergirl, and The Goldbergs.

 

Like I said, back in August I picked up Mallrats on Blu-ray and then I ended up watching it that night. This was the first Kevin Smith movie I ever watched and I loved it. To the point where I asked Brad to grab the VHS for me at Ottawa Comiccon in September, since I wasn't going until the Sunday and couldn't guarantee that the VHS would still be there when I got there on Sunday morning. And then I decided that if I found Clerks on DVD, Blu-ray, or VHS, I'd grab it too at the very least. When I was out with Brad a week ago I found Clerks on DVD, so I grabbed it.

I found the Canadian version of the 1999 DVD for Clerks, which is really cool since I don't have a whole lot of DVDs from the late '90s. It's a pretty decent DVD release for 1999. It doesn't have a ton of bonus features (they saved those for the 10th anniversary Clerks X DVD that came out in 2004), but it has the alternate ending and deleted scenes as well as a music video and a Film Recommendations section. One of the movies in that section is Chasing Amy, which has a "Coming Soon" tag beneath the title. Clerks was originally released on DVD on June 29th, 1999 while Chasing Amy was released on DVD on April 2nd, 2000. So almost a year apart. But I'm wondering if Chasing Amy was supposed to come out in late 1999, but got pushed back to April 2000 instead. That would make sense if the people who produced the DVD thought Chasing Amy was coming out sooner than it did, but didn't have any kind of release date for it, hence why they included the "Coming Soon" tagline under the movie's title (and VHS cover) in the Film Recommendations section on the Clerks DVD.

Overall this was a fun movie and I'm glad that I finally got to see it after all these years. I'm also glad that I found it on DVD. Physical media is very important to me. Particularly physical media formats from the '90s and early 2000s like VHS tapes, DVDs, and CDs. Those are the formats I grew up with and I love finding movies, TV shows, and music from that era on those formats. So finding the first DVD release of Clerks from 1999, albeit the Canadian version, is pretty cool. 

Alright my friends, that's it for me for today. I don't know when I'll be back on here or over on The Star Trek Journal, because I got stuff going on next week that may prevent me from posting. I promise that I'll be back as soon as I can. Until then have a great afternoon and I will talk to you all later. Take care.