Two more great scenes from Animal House, also (Movie House Review) in high definition zipped .avis. First, Pinto debates with himself over whether to fuck Sarah Holcomb after she passes out. Second, Otter has removed the bra of the well-appointed Lisa Baur when several panicked people join them in the car.

A very brief zipped .avi clip of Kattia Ortiz in Entourage, season three episode three.

There is no female nudity in Clerks 2, but Rosario Dawson looks great bouncing around in her dance number. Review below.

I took the young members of my family to the advance showing of Clerks 2 in Austin. That includes my son, my daughter, and my niece. They range in age from 15-22. That may gave some of you an indication that I totally lack parenting skills insofar as I exposed impressionable youngsters to such raunchy material, but ... well ... setting aside my own personal failings for a second, the point of this paragraph is supposed to be that they all loved it, and it is the kind of anarchic film that the youth of every recent generation probably have embraced.

In other words, Kevin Smith has delivered a film that will please his target audience, which consists of his existing fans and the next generation of rebellious youth who comprise his future fans. That is an accomplishment. When Smith wrote Clerks some dozen years before, it was a film that reeked of sincerity. It reeked in other ways as well, but what made the whole thing really work, and eventually to become a cult classic, was that it was true. It captured the angst of high school graduates trapped in go-nowhere lives with unflinching accuracy. The dialogue included plenty of geekspeak, raunchy and unbridled sex talk, and various other politically incorrect notions of all kinds. It was exactly how those characters, reasonably intelligent people in that generation and in those situations, really talked, as opposed to a sterile Hollywood notion of what their lives ought to be like.

Kevin knew that life. He lived that life. He was a bright, funny, thoughtful, politically incorrect guy who had worked as a clerk.

The big question with Clerks II centered around Smith's ability to stay in touch. Unlike the situation in Clerks, when his characters' lives and his life were similar (he made Clerks by putting some $28,000 on his personal credit cards and selling his comic book collection), they have now gone in separate directions. Dante and Randal are doing the same things at 33 that they were doing at 21, except they are all too aware that they have now worked temporary jobs for more than a decade. Jay and Silent Bob have been through addiction and rehab, and are still leaning against walls selling drugs. Smith, on the other hand, is now a multi-millionaire hotshot director with a sexy actress wife and a collection of Hollywood pals. When he was 21 he knew the very guys he was writing about. Presumably he doesn't know many people like Dante and Randal now (although he certainly knows somebody like Jay, because his friend Jason Mewes has essentially been writing the Jay part with his own life), and can no longer write their lines through the filter of his own passion. Could Smith stay sufficiently in tune with his characters to retain the edge of the original?

My answer to that question has to be a wishy-washy "I don't know." I don't know jack straws about which subjects are discussed by 33-year-old slackers, or whether they regret and/or justify the abandonment of their dreams. I can tell you, however, that I was persuaded by the characters and situations. They felt sincere to me. Whether or not Kevin really understands thirty-something slackers, he still feels their pain, and his characters still seem vivid and honest. He's brought some thought to the small details of character as well. Randal, for example, can't quite remember which characters were which from the books in his required high school reading, and thinks that Anne Frank is Helen Keller. To cite another example, I presume Kevin knows how to pronounce "bestiality," but none of his characters do, and that is exactly as it should be. If Kevin no longer feels the passion of the clerks, at least he still has compassion for them. I think that is all you can reasonably expect until an impoverished and older comic book geek comes along and maxes out his own credit cards to make a film.

In the meantime, it's fair to say that this film will be remembered for other elements besides the sincerity of the portrayals and the story arc of the characters. It is, after all, a comedy, and its primary evaluative criterion must therefore be laughter. There was a lot of that in Austin. You have to understand that the audience in Austin consisted of Smith fans who had ponied up at least thirty bucks apiece to participate in an agape, so one cannot really measure the film fairly by their reaction, but I can certainly report that they did love it. In fact, they loved the jokes so goddamned much that they kept laughing through subsequent funny dialogue. Indeed, it made me squirm in my seat a couple of times to hear the audience laughing at material that clearly did not work, like a very lame attempt to diss Hayden Christensen simply by having a guy do a robotic delivery of "Name: Maniken Skywalker. Ruining series with shitty acting." If they'll laugh at that, they'd probably laugh at Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio if Kevin put his name on it as a producer.

Having observed that, let me add that my family members joined the rest of the audience in giving the film a resounding "whoo" and all thumbs pointed heavenward. My 22-year-old son is a big movie buff and has seen all of Kevin's films except Jersey Girl, and he thought Clerks II to be high on the Kevin Scale. My 20-year-old daughter is a film fan, but is not really familiar with Kevin's films. She was whooping and hooting along with the die-hard Kevin addicts. My more conservative 15-year-old niece loves movies, and loved this one, although she was shocked a few times by outrageous sexually-oriented material, especially of the interspecies variety. In other words, there's some seriously raunchy shit in this flick. Those of you with more evolved parenting skills than my own may want to take note of that. If I had to do it all over again, I might not have invited the youngster, even though she had a great time.

As for me, well, I loved the humor as well, for two primary reasons:

• Originality. You know that I watch just about every freakin' movie that comes out, and I probably do watch every single comedy that I know of, and not many of them make me laugh any more. Part of comedy's essence is surprise, and very few movies deliver lines and situations that I haven't already seen or couldn't have created myself. Most of the films which are supposed to be funny are either gimmick-based situation comedies or gross-out comedies with by-the-numbers hack dialogue. On the other hand, Kevin's situations are grounded in real people who must abide by the laws of the natural universe, and his dialogue continually manages to seem fresh.
• Edge. Another part of comedy's man-juice is shock. Most of Hollywood's so-called comedies are about as edgy as the annual Pablum-Fest, as sponsored by the Pennsylvania Gathering of the Brotherhood of Quakers. Hollywood has generally been sanitized for my protection, and transgressive comedy now seems to have been banished from films and broadcast, having been herded by the censorship Nazis into the comedy ghetto of nightclubs and satellite radio - except for the works of Kevin Smith and Parker/Stone. Bless those guys. Societies need loud voices to challenge their taboos, and Kevin has one of the loudest. Of course, he's not just outrageous and loud. He's also one funny motherfucker.

It all boils down to this. I like the structure of the film and find the characters genuine, at least within the limited evaluative capacity of a 57-year-old former corporate president trying to measure how sincerely young slackers are pictured. I also laughed a lot. The audience of Kevin fans was totally pleased with the experience. The youngsters in my own family had a great time and all three found the film far better than they expected.

So I guess the thumb count, as Jay might put it, is all way the fuck up.

---

Sidebar:

I deliberately restricted the notes above to my thoughts about the movie itself. Let me add something about the entire experience, because Kevin was there for Q&A after the screening. I'll make it short and to the point: you just can't go wrong by attending a live presentation by Kevin Smith. He has a great rapport with the audience, is quick on his feet, is very funny, improvises well, is totally candid, and gives far more of his time than anyone could reasonably expect from a guy with a busy schedule. He went on and on and on like an Energizer Walrus, even though he had commitments the next day in a different city. That is brilliant marketing on his part, of course, but he also seems to enjoy the experience immensely. One suspects that he loves his fans as much as they love him, which is very much indeed.

 

 

OTHER CRAP:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

First up from the Ghost...Stayce Allison shows off her robo-goodies in scenes from her one and only film credit, 1997's "Legend of the Mummy".

Stayce Allison

Teresa Hill

"Basic Instinct 2" (Unrated)
Boy the critics hated this one! Sharon Stone, looking amazing at 48, reprises her role as Catherine Trammel in 2006's Basic Instinct 2.

Set after the end of the original, Catherine is now in London, and people are once again dying around her, as she writes novels about them. As in the first movie, she escapes the long arm of the law, and a psychiatrist appointed by the courts to examine her becomes entranced with her.

Same basic story as the original, Sharon Stone looking as sexy and being as bitchy as ever, lots of fun as she sticks it to the man. It's this simple: if you liked the original, this one isn't bad, and if you hated the original, forget about this one.

The ladies of "Backbeat"...the 1994 Beatles movie that tells the story of the Lads from Liverpool as they play the clubs of Hamburg in the early 60's (before they hit it über-big).

Finola Geraghty

Unknowns

Sheryl Lee