Ray Pride

Verbal, vulgar, raunchy and relentless, Kevin Smith's "Clerks II" is an improbable personal statement about love and destiny, especially considering the nine-minute donkey-show scene.

Dante and Randall (Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson) are pushing the big 33 in a new dead-end job. After the demise of the grotty Quick Stop mini-mart, the pair man the grills at a ridiculous fast-food chain outlet called Mooby's. Extended rants about the virtues of George Lucas, Christ and Peter Jackson bubble up, of course, especially from an inspired character, a co-worker named Elias (Trevor Fehrman), a "sheltered, battered puppy" in Smith's formulation. Fehrman's dazed, non-druggy physical humor is almost as much fun to watch as Rosario Dawson playing Becky, the joint's unlikely manager. (Smith's choice to keep the camera on Dawson without cutaways whenever she flirts, cajoles, swears or dabbles in scatology makes this a very special film for that alone.) Dante's getting married, though, and moving to Florida with his bride-to-be (played by Smith's wife, Jennifer Schwalbach). Who'll be more upset when Dante's gone? Randall or Becky? Let the swears begin.

A Weinstein Company release, "Clerks II" is being released, through a complicated business deal, as an MGM film. "It's weird to me to see that lion at the head of the movie," Smith tells me. "I've always been a Miramaxer at heart, a Miramaxketeer, if you will. It took me a while to come to grips with the fact that Miramax wouldn't be at the head of 'Clerks II,' that it would be the Weinstein Company. But Miramax was Harvey and Bob, so as long as it says Weinstein, it's as good as it saying Miramax. But suddenly seeing the MGM logo, it's a whole different world. There's an odd, perverse thrill--the same fuckin' logo that starts `The Wizard of Oz' starts `Clerks II.'"

Wearing a baseball jacket emblazoned with the words "Total Whore," Smith expresses amazement that his movie got an "R" rating. "We didn't see any way to cut this movie. It was like, where do you start? The MPAA is never that helpful in terms of the things they find problematic. They don't tell you, if you cut four seconds of this, we'll give you an R. It was a real sticking point but it didn't reach the point of ugliness but we were dreading that it would. I had my arguments ready to go, like all the movies I could cite, which they don't want you to cite in the appeals process, but I would fuckin' blurt `em out anyway. All the movies that have gotten an R, like `Bachelor Party' had a donkey show, they got an R. In `Brokeback Mountain,' fuckin' Heath Ledger spits in his hand, that got an R. Why can't we have the donkey dude spit in his hand in our movie? I was ready for the holy war of all time. The massive fuckin' jihad against the MPAA." But after the screening he gets the call: "`Surprise! They gave you an R.' And I was like, `WHAT?' [The ratings liaison] was like, they gave us an R. `With no suggested cuts?' He's like, `they said there's stuff they personally would cut but they know that you're not going to so they just gave it an R.' When the dust settled, I was just like... `Are they fucking nuts? Did they see the same movie?' And Mosier was like, `dude, shut up. Just take the R!'"

Smith cites the "Wizard of Oz" again in the film's surprisingly loving, lovely ending, which I won't give away. "Both of them, to me, occur to me as incredibly heroic," Smith says of how it all turns out. "It's not heroic like Wolverine popping his claws and taking out Jean Grey, it's that quiet heroism of somebody doing something that never in a million years you would expect them to do and arriving at that conclusion themselves. I just love it. It really works for me, man. That's the movie. All the other stuff is scenery."

One reason is that he sees the choices made by the characters akin to his own. "I just wanna make small movies that can get the financiers their money back but allow me to tell the exact story I want to tell and to do it in the shape and form that I want to do it in. For years, I've been fuckin' inundated with people saying, `it's time for you to stretch as a filmmaker, it's time for you to grow as a filmmaker'... and it's like... I, I don't want to. These are the stories that I want to tell. After twelve years, don't you get it, Harvey? This is what I do. I enjoy doing it and you guys turn a profit off of it, so why do I need to do a Green Hornet movie? Why do something other than what I'm comfortable and fairly good at doing?"

Clerks II opens Friday.

(2006-07-18)

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