CHASING CHASING AMY***

CHASING CHASING AMY is a wonderful and raw and vulnerable documentary about what the 1990s Kevin Smith dramedy CHASING AMY meant to those making it and those who watched it.  

The film is one that I loved when it came out: I was a deep-cut Kevin Smith fan, and even loved his critically panned second film MALLRATS. CHASING AMY was a film that was meant to revive his career after that failure and it did. It starred Ben Affleck as an earnest but insecure comic book writer called Holden who falls in love with a fellow artist called Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) who is both way more sexually experienced and bisexual. 

The narrative arc centres Holden and his journey to emotional maturity.  The comedy, as in all of Kevin Smith, is crude and blunt and politically incorrect and brilliant.  Both Holden's best friend Banky (Jason Lee) and Alyssa's gay friends find it hard to understand their sexual relationship.  There's a lot of casually homophobic and biphobic language.  And worst of all to modern sensibilities, the film was written and directed by a straight white man centring his own journey.  So as much as the film was loved at the time of its release, it has since been condemned as tone-deaf and problematic and largely forgotten.

That's when trans male film-maker Sav Rodgers entered the story.  He was a teenager being bullied in school for being queer. Watching CHASING AMY was a lifeline. He saw Alyssa and her friends - proudly out, incredibly smart, sex-positive - as role model.  Sav asserts that the film literally saved his life.  Fast forward through a virally popular Ted Talk on the subject and Sav connects with Kevin Smith, is welcomed into the director's home, and makes this documentary.

What we get is a strange but compelling doc with three strands. The first is Sav's own story as geeky bullied lesbian woman who finds the courage to become a married trans man and film director thanks to the love of his amazing wife Riley, his amazing mum, and maybe also the friendship and mentorship of Kevin Smith.  

The second is the story of Kevin Smith and his evident joy and finding someone who appreciates his art and is deeply moved by it.  

But it's the final strand that is the most compelling and it's the story of the women who have a far more complex relationship with the film. 

The first woman is Joey Lauren Adams, who never found the stardom she might have expected, maybe because Harvey Weinstein didn't like her and maybe because she was playing these unconventional roles.  The movie was based on her real-life relationship with Smith and while she's glad the movie exists, she finds it really difficult to see their two-year painful relationship relived on screen. That real life Kevin or fictional Holden emotionally grow is great, but it came at her real-life expense. She is also far more damning of the idea that you can enjoy the success of the film at Sundance when you now know what Harvey Weinstein was doing to Rose McGowan at that very festival. Smith mentions it and acknowledges it but it's Adams who really feels it.

The second woman who got ripped off is film writer, director and actor Guinevere Turner - the real-life lesbian who inspired Alyssa. She describes seeing her real conversations with Smith transcribed in CHASING AMY, and her horror as her own female-centred, lesbian-authored film GO FISH faded into the background as Smith's more mainstream appealing CHASING AMY got all the plaudits.

This is all really complicated stuff and it's not clear that the young film-maker Sav Rodgers has the emotional maturity or film-making maturity to deal with the issues he stirs up with his interviews.  He does not go back to Smith to try to hold him to account or to pierce his rather earnestly complacent attitude toward the film.  He does not know what to say to Adams when she lays the reality down on him. That's not Sav's fault - he's so young and dealing with his own stuff. But it makes for a frustrating viewing experience.

CHASING CHASING AMY played Tribeca and London 2023. It has a running time of 93 minutes and is available to rent and own.

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO - schmaltz masquerading as edgy

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO is another one of those movies (viz. THE MOGULS) that uses porn in an attempt to give an edgy vibe to what is essentially your typical schmaltzy formulaic rom-com. 

In this case, it's the classic plot where two best friends only realise they're in love when they see each other mack with someone else. Of course, they could just get together at the point of mutual recognition but, oh no, there has to be some easily avoidable mix-up that requires a last reel reconciliation.In this case, Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are losers who have zero money to pay the bills. Rather than get off their asses, go to college and get real jobs, they decide to make a porno for cash. There's no real suspense. Even the characters realise that once they have sex their relationship will change. The fact that matters are spun out with a bunch of petty jealousy is incidental.

ZACK AND MIRI isn't offensive. I mean, there's a lot of swearing and whatnot, but it's not a fundamentally hateful movie. In fact, it's as cuddly as a teddy bear.  And here's the thing. Porn is now so mainstream that it has become banal. There's simply not the same shock value in mentioning tits and ass.

ZACK AND MIRI isn't funny either. I mean, there's the odd patch of funny dialogue but it's never as balls-out funny as CLERKS. It's just more of the same "middle period" Smith. Hamfisted direction, formulaic plots, occasionally blackly funny dialogue swamped by sentimentality....

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO played Toronto 2008 and is currently on release in the US, Canada, UK and Russia. It opens on November 28th in Iceland, on December 18th in the Czech Republic and Finland, on January 15th in Australia and Romania, on January 22nd in the Netherlands and on April 1st in Belgium.

Kevin Smith retrospective - CLERKS II (2006) - Look at you two whipping out her preciouses!

Randal Graves: What's the point in having an Internet connection if you're not using it to look up weird, fucked-up pictures of dirty sex you'll never have yourself?

You can find Nikolai's original review of CLERKS II here

CLERKS II played Cannes 2006 and went on release in 2006 and 2007. It's available on DVD.
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Kevin Smith retrospective - JERSEY GIRL (2004) - in which Kevin Smith proves he can direct a movie as banal as any mainstream rom-com offering

JERSEY GIRL is a travesty - a movie in which hard-edged indie film-maker Kevin Smith jumps the shark with a movie as schmaltzy, formulaic and manipulative as the worst of the romantic-comedy genre. And no, the fact that his hero and heroine meet-cute over video-porn does not mitigate the BOMF trite denouement in which the hero has to choose between a big-shot job in New York and attending his daughter's school play. Liv Tyler's soft-spoken dead-pan certainly suits the merciful, porn-researching new girlfriend but Ben Affleck is typically wooden as the newly widowed single dad. Raquel Castro is fine as the kid, and George Carlin is heavily sanitised as her grandfather in this mainstream release. The only good thing about this movie, and I doubt I'm the first to say it, is that Jennifer Lopez' character dies in the first fifteen minutes.

JERSEY GIRL was released in and is available on DVD.

Kevin Smith retrospective - JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK (2001) - Affleck, you the *bomb* in Phantoms yo!

Jay: This isn't fair. We came to Hollywood, I fell in love. Fuckin', we got shot at, we stole a monkey, and I got punched in the motherfucking nuts by a guy named Cock-Knocker.
Banky: You know what? I feel for you boys, I really do, but Miramax - you know, Miramax Films - paid me a shitload of money for Bluntman and Chronic. So it occurs to me that people badmouthing you on some website, is NONE OF MY FUCKING CONCERN!
Silent Bob: Oh, but I think it is... We had a deal with you, on the comics remember, for likeness rights, and as we're not only the artistic basis, but also obviously the character basis, for your intellectual property, Bluntman and Chronic. When said property was optioned by Miramax Films, you were legally obliged to secure our permission to transfer the concept to another medium. As you failed to do that, Banky, you are in breach of the original contract, ergo you find yourself in a very actionable position.
Jay: Yeah.

After the religious satire cum road movie that was DOGMA, Kevin Smith kicked back with his highest-budget movie to date, JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK. Although they are very different in tone and aspiration, the two movies actually share the same structure. After all, what is JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK if not a Hollywood satire cum road movie?

The plot of the movie is, once again, very simple. Jay and Silent Bob realise that Miramax is making a comic book movie based on characters based on Jay and Silent Bob. So they head to Hollywood to get their cut of the proverbial phat cash. Along the way they engage in a bunch of shenanigans that allow Kevin Smith to have a giant love-in with all his favourite actors. As such, any hope of actually satirising Hollywood is neutered. It's hard to land a sucker-punch when you're fisting the head of the studio.

For all that, JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK is arguably more entertaining than DOGMA insofar as it panders to the fans' desire to be part of the "in-joke" and namecheck the cameos and movie references. Some of the skits are genuinely hillarious - not least the early scenes with Jason Lee in Brodie mode and later scenes with Jason Biggs. And, as far as I'm concerned, you can never have too much of Jason Mewes' inspired pot-head stylings. But, unlike MALLRATS, which is also a flawed but occasionally extremely funny movie, I haven't revisited JAY AND SILENT BOB in a long while. It's the classic problem with parodies - no matter how well done, they age horribly.

Or maybe I'm just playing into Smith's post-modern move with my rancid stylings?!*.

JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK was released in 2001 and 2002. It is available on DVD replete with extras.

*Banky: That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously. Stopping the flick isn't gonna stop that.

Kevin Smith retrospective - DOGMA (1999)

After CHASING AMY came Kevin Smith's most intellectually ambitious movie yet, DOGMA. The budget was back up to 10 mil and with it we got the same problem as with MALLRATS - poor quality professional actors unused to handling Kevin Smith's particular brand of dialogue. The bigger and more fundamental problem was that DOGMA was simply too ambitious a project - trying to satirise organised religion, specifically the Catholic Church and its apocryphal beliefs.

The plot is actually pretty simple. God speaks to an abortion clinic clerk and lapsed Catholic called Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) in the guise of Metatron - the voice of god (Alan Rickman). This sarcastic British angel tells Bethany to go to a church in New Jersey and stop two pissed off fallen angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) from bringing about Armageddon. Bethany will be helped by two prophets aka Jay and Silent Bob and will meet a muse (Salma Hayek), a disciple (Chris Rock), and various evil guys (Jason Lee et al).

The result is basically a road movie upon which Kevin Smith hangs various skits that expound upon his beef with organised religion. There are no great insights here - the usual teen angst stuff most Catholics go through - and for every clever gag that raises a laugh there are nine others that don't. (It's telling that the funniest line in the movie wasn't written by Smith but was ad-libbed by Chris Rock). There's just too much going on and too little feeling of a strong hand organising all the material. In addition, Smith isn't helped by a weak and uncharismatic centreal performance from his leading lady, or indeed minor players such as Hayek. Then again, it's hard to feel any sympathy for a man who casts Alanis Morisette as god.

What can I say? DOGMA is just a complete failure as a film, as far as I'm concerned. It was all the more disappointing because it was the first Kevin Smith film that I watched on the big screen - the brilliantly bizarre Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford. Still, I'd rather see a movie fail through vaulting ambition than through sterile cliche.

Bethany: Then - I don't mean to sound ungrateful - but what are you doing hanging around?
Jay: We're here to pick up chicks.
Bethany: Excuse me?
Jay: We figure an abortion clinic is a good place to meet loose women. Why else would they be there unless they like to fuck?

DOGMA played Cannes and Toronto 1999 and opened in 1999 and 2000. It is available on DVD.

Kevin Smith retrospective - CHASING AMY (1997) - Your mother is a tracer!

After the high profile flop of the 6 million dollar budgeted MALLRATS, Kevin Smith's next feature was a dialled back 250k drama called CHASING AMY. The limited budget may have caused producer Scott Mosier a head-ache but it enabled writer-director Kevin Smith to create a movie as funny as CLERKS but darker, more emotionally real, and more affecting. To this day, I think CHASING AMY is Smith's best film and also his most unique. It's his most profound and adult movie - the most bittersweet - the furthest away from the comic-book stylings of JAY AND SILENT BOB - and yet the movie most firmly embedded in the comic-book community. Once again, we're back to the paradoxes.

The movie could share the title of Simon Callow's autobiography, "Love is where it falls" - the story of a passionate friendship between a gay man and a straight woman. CHASING AMY is about a straight man called Holden (Ben Affleck) who has an affair with a lesbian woman called Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) invoking the jealousy of his apparently straight best friend Banky (Jason Lee.) The first half the film depicts Holden's attempt to persuade Alyssa to try a straight relationship. The second half depicts his attempts to reconcile himself with his best friend's feelings for him and his feelings of sexual inadequacy and latent prurience when confronted with Alyssa's sexual past. The movie shows real insight and bravery in dealing with slippery sexual (and indeed racial) politics. It has its moments of real emotional intensity - the declaration of love by Holden to Alyssa is beautifully written - but it also manages to avoid any mawkish sentimentality, especially in its brilliantly ambiguous ending. At the same time, the movie is as brutally, honestly funny as anything Kevin Smith has ever written - and best of all, the comedy is grounded in real life rather than relying on ludicrous and implausible situations.

For me CHASING AMY is the perfect Kevin Smith movie. It's laugh-out-loud funny, but we're laughing at real situations. It's emotionally involving without being hokey. It's speaks honestly about sex and love. And if Ben Affleck struggles at times with Kevin Smith's dialogue and the weight of the emotion he has to portray, this is more than compensated for by the strong central performances from Joey Lauren Adams and Jason Lee and from Dwight Ewell's scene-stealing supporting role as the camp, militant comic book creator, Hooper:

Hooper: Always some white boy gotta invoke the holy trilogy. Bust this: Those movies are about how the white man keeps the brother man down, even in a galaxy far, far away. Check this shit: You got cracker farm boy Luke Skywalker, Nazi poster boy, blond hair, blue eyes. And then you got Darth Vader, the blackest brother in the galaxy, Nubian god!

Banky Edwards: What's a Nubian?

Hooper: Shut the fuck up! Now... Vader, he's a spiritual brother, y'know, down with the force and all that good shit. Then this cracker, Skywalker, gets his hands on a light saber and the boy decides he's gonna run the fuckin' universe; gets a whole clan of whites together. And they go and bust up Vader's hood, the Death Star. Now what the fuck do you call that?

Banky Edwards: Intergalactic civil war?

Hooper: Gentrification! They gon' drive out the black element to make the galaxy quote, unquote, safe for white folks. And Jedi's the most insulting installment! Because Vader's beautiful black visage is sullied when he pulls off his mask to reveal a feeble, crusty, old white man! They tryin' to tell us that deep inside we all wants to be white!

Banky Edwards: Well, isn't that true?

CHASING AMY played Sundance 1997 and was released over the next few years. It won a Special Recognition prize from the National Board of Review, and Jason Lee and Kevin Smith won Independent Spirit Awards for their acting and writing respectively. It's available on DVD.

Kevin Smith retrospective - MALLRATS (1995) - I love the smell of commerce in the morning!

After the dream-come-true distribution deal for CLERKS, Kevin Smith and producer Scott Mosier were given a bigger (remember the base level) budget and professional actors for their full colour follow-up MALLRATS. The basic concept was the same - a day in the life of two best friends talking about sex, bumping into old high school friends, and getting up to shenanigans. Both have gone to the local mall to try and win back their respective girlfriends who are tired of their slacker antics. 

There are two problems with MALLRATS. First, it's just not as tightly scripted as CLERKS - both in terms of the individual scenes of dialogue and in terms of the way in which the scenes stitch together to form the film. Without the constant on-the-button black humour the ludicrous events in MALLRATS seem, well, just ludicrous. There are no earthy insights to pin them down to reality or to make us care. The two lead characters - Brandi and T.S. are earnest but dull and there isn't a rich deck of minor characters to distract us from that. Finally there are no deep emotional insights - no sense of catharsis - as at the end of CLERKS. CLERKS was crude but also clever. MALLRATS is just a low-rent teen sex-comedy.

The second big problem with MALLRATS is that the acting is almost universally terrible. Admittedly, the acting sucked in CLERKS but that just made it seem more charming. On the other hand, you don't shell out money to see professional actors - Shannen Doherty, Claire Forlani, Jeremy London - three out of the four lead actors - uttering lines with all the feeling of my coffee table. 

For all that, I still watch MALLRATS, though less often than CLERKS. I watch it mainly for Jason Lee's performance as Brodie, the smart-talking Randal Graves-esque side-kick to the hero, T.S. and for the occasional flashes of brilliance that were so evident for the full run-time of CLERKS. And let's face it, even a bad Kevin Smith movie is still funnier and more original than most generic teen comedies out there.

T.S. Quint: How is it that I go from the verge of hot Floridian sex with Brandi to man of steel coital debates with you in the food court? 

Brodie: Cookie stand isn't part of the food court. 

T.S. Quint: Of course it is. 

Brodie: The food court is downstairs. The cookie stand is upstairs. It not like we're talking quantum physics here. 

T.S. Quint: The cookie stands counts as an eatery, eateries are part of the food court. 

Brodie: Bullshit. Eateries that operate within the designated square downstairs count as food court. Anything outside, of said designated sqaure, counts as an autonomous unit for mid-mall snacking.  

MALLRATS went on release in 1995 and 1996 and is available on DVD but without the fanfare, whistles and bells of the CLERKS ten year anniversary re-release.

Kevin Smith retrospective - CLERKS (1994) - Did he say "making fuck"? (spoilers)

The mythos about how Kevin Smith financed, shot and got distribution for his debut feature, CLERKS, has entered movie legend, not least because Smith has written a book about it. It's the film student's ray of hope - that you can make a movie financed with credit cards, exhibiting zero production values but still get picked up by the Weinsteins and become a cult classic. CLERKS is the indie circuit's American Dream.

Once you strip away the hype, what you're left with is a movie that's full of wooden acting and looks terrible, but for all that stands the test of time because of it's brilliant dialogue, intricate plotting and the audacity of its central premise - to talk about the shit that we all talk about - failed relationships, careers that never quite get going, people who annoy the frack out of us at work, and the stupid stuff that happens in movies.

Like most people I first watched CLERKS years after it was released. It was like a potty-mouthed dirty secret, passed on from one friend to another on rented VHS tape - a student bonding moment like listening to DEREK AND CLIVE tapes. In my case, it was Fast Jimmy who rented it from our very own local video store, about as crummy as the one in Clerks and manned by a similarly permanently pissed off clerk. At first I was unimpressed. What was this crappily shot black and white nonsense? But as soon as we got to the first argument between our protagonist, Dante Hicks, and his girlfriend Veronica, I was hooked. It became, and remains, one of my all-time favourite films. You see, the whole shining path for indie film-makers mythos is pure sentimental bilge. Kevin Smith made it against all odds not because Sundance has forged a path to the then-Miramax but because Kevin Smith is a bloody brilliant writer who trains his byzantine plots and ear for the black humour on our every day lives.

Dante Hicks: I'm stuck in this pit, working for less than slave wages. Working on my day off, the goddamn steel shutters are closed, I deal with every backward ass fuck on the planet. I smell like shoe polish. My ex-girlfriend is catatonic after fucking a dead guy. And my present girlfriend has sucked 36 dicks.

Randal Graves: 37.

And that's basically it. CLERKS is about two best friends, Dante Hicks and Randal Graves who work in a convenience store and a video store respectively. Randall knows his life is stuck in a rut, but languishes in the petty victories of a life amidst the inane. By contrast, Dante is caught between a misplaced sense of responsibility for running the store and his hatred for his loser existence. His deep sense of dissatisfaction manifests itself in the fact that he wants to trade in his loyal girlfriend Veronica for his unfaithful high school sweetheart Caitlin, who's engagement to an Asian design major triggers her arrival in town and many of the events of the story. The point of the movie is that Dante needs to stop bitching about the stuff that happens to him and make some hard choices. It's a message that cuts home to anyone in their early twenties, clinging onto their teen years and reluctant to slide down the razor blade of life.

Given that the movie is set entirely in a convenience store, it's amazing how much action Kevin Smith manages to pack in and how all the seemingly ridiculous and implausible events seem to tie up and reinforce each other in creating a richer universe that underlies the action shown in this particular film. I seriously don't think it's too far to compare this movie to something like LORD OF THE RINGS where we feel that there is a rich back-story of characters and lives and that we're just seeing a slice of the potential craziness that could be depicted. And there's the paradox of CLERKS. By talking about normal neuroses with such complete honesty, Kevin Smith gets away with ludicrous plotting. And that in shamelessly depicting in belly-laugh-inducing profanities, Smith sends out a pretty moralistic, conservative message.

CLERKS played Sundance, Cannes and Toronto 1994. It was released over the next two years and is available on DVD.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - SOUTHLAND TALES

SOUTHLAND TALES is Richard Kelly's satire on post 9-11 US society. It's a paranoid fantasy about a USA destroyed by the four things: terrorism; the government's anti-liberal response to it; the vulgarity of popular culture; and environment degradation. Sadly, Kelly isn't up to synthesising all these concerns into a definitive take on contemporary angst. Rather, he has created an ambitious, fleetingly interesting, but overwhelmingly baggy, messy and pretentious film.

The movie is a rag-bag of inter-twining stories all played out in Kelly's alternate USA in 2008. A terrorist nuclear attack has wiped out Texas and prompted the US government to turn the US into a police state. Meanwhile, the energy crisis has been solved by a company that harnesses wave power to produce energy, the side-effect of which is to slow down the rotation of the earth and cause a warp in the space-time continuum. Against this back-drop we focus on three characters. The Rock plays a Schwarzenegger-like actor suffering from amnesia, trying to make sense of it all. He's being exploited by a porn star turned cultural commentator, Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Meanwhile, Seann William Scott plays a police officer, on the trail of Marxist radicals and his alternate self. All these characters are being messed up warps in the space-time continuum caused by environmental degradation.

The resulting film is a mess. And not in the way that Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL is a mess, but touched by genius, and therefore a cult film. SOUTHLAND TALES is misconceived. "State of the nation" content is better suited to the format of the novel. Novels like THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES or VANITY FAIR can take their time and build up a coherent narrative. My proposition is that the feature film is fundamentally unsuited to this kind of artistic endeavour.

SOUTHLAND TALES played Cannes 2006 to a disastrous reception. It was then put on extremely limited release in the UK and US in winter 2007. It is available on DVD in the theatrical release cut.

CLERKS II - Interspecies Erotica

This review is brought to you by guest reviewer, Nik, who can normally be found here:

Nikolai 3:16 - For I so loved Clerks that I spent my only begotten Saturday evening watching the sequel, that whosoever readeth this blog shall not waste their money but save 2 hours of their life.

Actually, that's slightly unfair, but let's start with the downside, and there's a big downside:

It's no wonder that most of the cast from the original Clerks never got a job in acting again, until this sequel. Clerks II is poorly acted - so poorly that, even in the few places where the script isn't sweaty monkeyballs, it actually makes you want to look away. But don't worry too much about that, because the number of times that the script and dialogue struggle to lift themselves out of the mire sufficiently for the audience to notice the terrible acting are strictly and skillfully minimised by the author.

The "plot", so called, that writer/director Kevin Smith tried to inject into Clerks II in between the comic sequences was so laughably awful, so patronisingly predictable, and so execrably executed that it literally made even the most hardcore Clerks fans amongst us squirm in their seats. Indeed, the "plot" actually seemed to spoil and dull, at least in part, the comic sequences that proceeded it - since rather than making us love the main protagonists more and empathise with their plight - it managed to stir antipathy and distaste at their actions. To make it worse, the film was nothing to look at - the production values were zero - the camera was skewed and occasionally out of focus - this was an amateurish job. Some might say that this was in honour of the original Clerks - but it wore thin.

But having savaged almost everything important about Clerks II, I must admit, there is a plus side. For Clerks fans at least, this was a funny film. Bina007 and I were laughing hard most of the way through - although it should be noted that Professor007, who had never seen or heard of Clerks before, was far less impressed with the comedy. Sure, there were sequences and jokes that simply didn't work (e.g. "One ring to rule them all") - and some that weren't capitalised on at all that could have been explosive (e.g. "pussy trolls") but the sheer number of gags - the weight of comedy - managed to see this film through until the end.

As well as that, the homo-erotic tension between our two heros Dante and Randall was much more pronounced than in the first film - and though I'm sure Professor007 was cringing in his seat - Bina and I thought it was rather cute. They actually made a nice couple, and it would have been sweet to see them kissing at the end, although of course, for the sake of a 15-rating I'm sure, that didn't happen. But happily, the 15-rating didn't stop them from putting beastiality, breasts, ass-to-mouth, drugs and liberal sprinklings of vaginal humour in there. Which is what I paid my 20 bucks to see.

But readers, as much as I loved Clerks - Dante, Randall, Jay and Silent Bob - I can't in all good conscience recommend this film to any but those who saw and loved the first film. It's not that there are that many in-jokes in the sequel - it's just that you already have to know and love the characters, their situation, their idiosyncracies, to really appreciate this movie. Clerks II simply doesn't contain any characterisation, or scene setting, or decent plot - so someone coming to this film fresh, as Professor007 did, will be totally unable to properly appreciate it.

So if like Bina and I you loved Clerks, go and see Clerks II, it'll pass the time and give you some hearty and hard fought laughs. Otherwise, save your money for the destined to be epic "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan". Personally I can't wait!

CLERKS II is already on release in the US, Australia, Israel, Spain, the UK and Iceland. It opens in Portugal, Russia and Italy later this month and in the Netherlands in October. It opens in Hungary in November and Belgium and France in January 2007.