Have You Rented...

It’s the end of the year – Oscar season – and you’re at the video store faced with a tough decision…












CLERKS 2 is the hometown favorite. Since the original CLERKS, Kevin Smith has taken a tremendous interest in pleasing his fans. His 4-hour "AN EVENING WITH KEVIN SMITH" DVD's show that Smith can tell an entertaining and hilarious story about anything in his life.
The recently released EVENING 2 (which is way funnier than BEERFEST or CLERKS 2) also points up Smith’s biggest liability. He’s grown lazy, more interested in his family and his fans than in actually producing quality work.

CLERKS 2 is a sharp comedy mind simply paying the mortgage. The original CLERKS, for all its shortcomings, had a scruffy, politically incorrect attitude. It was the BORAT of its day. The sequel is softer in the head and the heart. The rants feel more forced, and are not nearly as cutting.

Kevin also made two terrible mistakes.
Aside from Dante, Randal, Jay and Silent Bob, there’s a new kid. I don’t know whether to blame the actor or the director, but the performance comes from another dimension. His dialogue comes out in a hesitant, nervous style that kills the humor.

And while Smith’s wife used to be startlingly attractive, she’s recently taken a serious downturn. I’m not bashing her. I’m bashing Smith because everyone in this film that he wrote and directed keeps talking about what an amazingly hot woman she is.
The film’s saving grace is Rosario Dawson as Dante and Randal’s new boss. She’s everything the movie is trying to be: cool, funny, sexy. She outclasses everyone, giving her most likable performance in a movie to date.

I also like the ending where the four main cast discuss the value of high school buddies becoming your life long friends. It’s by far the best writing of the film.
Like the films of Kevin Smith, I’ve seen all of Broken Lizard’s previous work. They share Smith’s amateur filmmaking and adolescent attitude. I could never recommend any of their films (even SUPER TROOPERS contains long stretches where nothing works), but I like them and sometimes they make me laugh hard.

While parts of BEERFEST are shamefully bad, with some poorly staged slapstick, I think it’s the group’s best film so far. There’s a sustained silliness to the film, even though it runs on for nearly two hours. (The DVD contains another 20+ min of deleted scenes.)
What’s interesting is BEERFEST doesn’t have a lot of dead time in its excessive length. (Pay attention WEDDING CRASHERS), it’s just that no movie about drinking beer should be over 95 minutes. With some trimming, this could have been the DODGEBALL or ANCHORMAN of beer. As is, I recommend it to anyone who saw BASEKETBALL. And I put it a couple of notches above CLERKS 2.