All Out Of Love.
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The A.V. Club just ran a terrific feature where all of their editors and writers wrote about those things in pop culture that they used to love, and can no longer stand. They all had some great and occasionally controversial answers, and it inspired me to ponder what my answer would have been. There are so many candidates!
It can happen for any number of reasons. You could have been in a great mood the day you first experienced something, only to see, upon revisiting it later, that your emotional state at the time may have heightened something undeserving. Your anticipation for an upcoming release might flavor your love for it once you finally get a look or a listen. You can be taken in by a song or a movie initially, only to notice, upon deeper reflection, its flaws or problematic themes. Sometimes you just grow up, and the stuff you loved as a younger person just can’t move you the way it used to. And sometimes you were completely right to be a fan at first – it’s the artist you love who was the one to let you down. This stuff happens with everybody, especially critics, but only the really good critics (like the folks at the A.V. Club) are willing to publicly admit it.
As someone who doesn’t shy away from writing critically occasionally and as someone who doesn’t shy away from admitting the possibility that he may occasionally be wrong, I couldn’t help but wonder what my answer would have been if it had been posed to me. Well, at the moment, for whatever reason, the first name that rushed up at me was Kevin Smith.
Kevin Smith was an inspiration and an influence when I was in high school and college. Looking back, Clerks and Mallrats are painful to watch on a cinematic level, but they’re still as funny – in an original way – as ever. I also liked, and related to, the love of depressing suburban locales that Smith was able to convey in those movies. Chasing Amy is a tougher movie, because I still respect the genuine emotion that obviously went into it and there’s still a lot of great dialogue in it, but it’s the last Kevin Smith movie I saw before I became a serious student of film. Once you gain an appreciation for things like cinematography and momentum and fluidity, it’s very difficult to watch a Kevin Smith film. Dogma is the first time I watched a Kevin Smith movie and wished that someone else had directed it. There’s individualistic humor and genuine invention in the script, but it looks and plays worse than ‘70s TV. Linda Fiorentino and my beloved Chris Rock are just awful in the movie, and as much as I love her, Salma Hayek should have never been forced to deliver Smith’s hyper-wordy dialogue. Really, the only actors that come out of Dogma without breaking a sweat are Jason Lee (who needs to go back to working with Smith) and George Carlin (naturally).
Then Smith made Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, which is by far his worst film. You can only even understand the movie if you’re a Kevin Smith superfan, which I guess I was at the time but even I couldn’t bear it. It made me seethe a little, actually. If someone gives you the chance to make a movie, why would you squander it making a movie about your own movies? If you’re a creative person, why wouldn’t you want to keep moving forward creatively? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that if you found Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back watchable, I don’t understand you.
Anyway, then we get Jersey Girl, which isn’t great (way too saccharine) but is nowhere near as bad as its reputation seems to suggest. I wonder if people who hate on Jersey Girl actually saw Jersey Girl. It's a movie with its heart in the right place, and even when those fail, they're better than fake, cynical, or embittered movies. I admired that Smith was trying to move outside of his comfort zone, and he deserves more credit for that than he gets, or gives himself in interviews. It’s just that his dramatic scenes tend to fall flat (at best) or make you cringe (at worst), even when he has great actors delivering them. Smith just doesn’t seem to be comfortable with overtly emotional scenes, even though he attempts them more often than his fans and detractors both seem to think he does.
I actually liked Clerks 2, because it had Rosario Dawson (who automatically makes every movie she's in better) and it had moments of really incisive comedy. Smith’s take on the Lord Of The Rings movies, in particular, is one of those things that makes me wonder why he didn’t become a stand-up comic who occasionally puts a film together, instead of a film director who occasionally tells jokes in front of a live audience. Smith is a great, candid interview, and if you've ever seen his Q&As, you know how smooth he is on stage. He really might have been a solid stand-up if he'd gone that way. It just seems like a more natural fit. I do still love the fact that Smith gets movies through the studio system that star his old friends – it’s the same reason I love Adam Sandler – I am a deeply loyal person myself and I admire that quality in other people. Kevin Smith is neither a visual stylist nor a consistently effective director of actors, but he is one seriously loyal dude. I absolutely appreciate that, even if I don’t think that Jason Mewes ever needs to be in a movie again. (Enjoyed him well enough as Jay, but I’ve seen that five or six times already and I can go back to the DVDs if I need to see it again.)
Zack & Miri Make A Porno was supposed to be a step forward for Smith, but it really does feel like a lesser Apatow production, rather than a superior Smith film. Again, Smith was able to cast some deft actors in key roles but wasn’t able to direct them effectively in the dramatic scenes. I don’t remember much about the story or the relationship between Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks’ characters, which indicates that I wasn’t moved to care. The only thing I remember well is that Zack & Miri Make A Porno had Star Wars jokes in it, and the only reason I remember that is because I was thinking how deeply weird it is that Kevin Smith is absolutely obsessed with Star Wars jokes. (Really, they're in pretty much everything he's ever done. That's monomania.) The bottom line is, Zack & Miri Make A Porno, like its title, was unexpectedly forgettable.
As I go through the filmography to write this article, I guess it’s evident that I’m not as completely out of love with Kevin Smith’s movies as I figured. For one thing, I’ve obviously seen them all. I haven't seen everything John Ford or Howard Hawks ever done, and I haven’t even seen all of Scorsese’s movies (seen almost everything, only The Last Waltz just never appealed to me), but I’ve seen all of Kevin Smith’s. So it’s clear that somewhere in me, I’m still rooting for him to deliver on the potential that I originally hoped that he had when I saw Clerks. But it's also clear that I don't feel like he's ever delivered it either.
His next movie is Cop Out. It’s called Cop Out because its original title, A Couple Of Dicks, was ultimately rejected. So the title change is canny enough, and yes, of COURSE I will go see a buddy comedy with Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan (with my beloved Rashida Jones somewhere in there too). Tracy Morgan is a deranged comedy demigod, and he's just the thing to bring new life to Bruce Willis, who's done this kind of thing so many times before. Looking over the credits for Cop Out on IMDB, Cop Out has me feeling both encouraged and a little discouraged at the same time. Jason Lee, Smith’s best muse, is in there somewhere, as are filthy comedian Jim Norton and a couple other ringers. Smith somehow got composer Harold Faltermeyer (Beverly Hills Cop, Fletch) to do the score, which is a great joke all by itself. I like that Smith has decided to make the kind of movie that we both like.
BUT: He’s editing it himself, and his longtime director of photography Dave Klein is shooting it. These two guys have between them had plenty of chances to show that they’ve developed some acuity for cinematic craft, and they haven’t done much with them. I’m a guy who’s seen all of Smith’s movies and I inadvertently wrote that I think he’d probably make a better stand-up comic than a film director, and as for Dave Klein, well, at least he doesn’t shake the camera during a take or drop the film after one. Plus, what makes Smith special is his writing ability, and he didn’t write Cop Out. Why not though? There’s no reason that Kevin Smith couldn’t write a funny buddy-cop comedy. I feel like that’s a genre he could actually do well. Cop comedies aren’t exactly an auteur genre for directors. They’re kind of a point-and-shoot genre. If they're cast right and they have decent one-liners, they generally work. Unparalleled hack Brett Ratner makes buddy-cop comedies, and he's made a ton of money with them. Clearly, it doesn't take much. At least Kevin Smith has the chance to make one that’s actually funny. But still, I continue to expect more from him.
Cop Out comes to theaters on February 26th, 2010. Before that happens, you can find Kevin Smith all over the internet, most unsurprisingly, on Twitter. (Please Kevin Smith, take yourself more seriously than this. Scale back on the Twitter. You’re a well-known film director. You get to make movies for a living. You're living a dream. You should be above engaging in word-wars with airline representatives and your own fans. Let it go. Just let it go. Don’t let the rest of the world distract you from your writing.)
(Yeah, I know. Glass houses. I’m on Twitter too, but I have to be. I only have 100 followers!)
