30 Jan 2007

Clerks II

Director: Kevin Smith

Starring: Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Rosario Dawson, Trevor Fehrman

Awards: Audience Award, Edinburgh International Film Festival

Release: 2007-01-30

In 1994, Kevin Smith turned sick, politically-incorrect, frat-boy humour into an art form with his film Clerks. Now, more than 10 years later, he has come up with a sequel that again makes crude fun of everything from blowjobs to clitorises to bestiality (which the film prefers to call "interspecies erotica") to Lord of the Rings. If that's your kind of entertainment, then Clerks II is for you.

Actors Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson reprise their roles as slackers Dante and Randal working in dead-end jobs flipping patties and ringing up the cash register at a burger joint, while talking rubbish about the world and their lives. Dante has made plans to marry his fianc�e and leave New Jersey for a better life in Florida. But being the natural born slacker that he is, he starts to have second thoughts...

Honestly, we don't really dig this sort of humour. There are raunchy sex jokes, pop culture spoofs and un-PC jibes galore, but one can't help the feeling that it's all so last millennium. Johnny Knoxville and the pranksters in Jackass have raised the stakes in crude humour, and the Farrelly brothers (Dumb and Dumber, There's Something About Mary) have long lost their popularity. Has Kevin Smith lost his too?