Clerks II (2006)

Hanging out with my good buddy/pal/amigo on my last night during my visit home last week, we enjoyed a pair of movies about male friendship! While I was home in NJ, we decided to take a trip to Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash in Red Bank and the Quickstop in Leonardo where the original Clerks was filmed. It was a pretty geeky, silly outing but very enjoyable and it totally put us in the mood for Clerks II.

This is a film that, like most Kevin Smith films, boils down to the beauty/importance of friendship. Set 10 years after the first film, we find Randall (Jeff Anderson) the same wise-cracking, inappropriate-at-all-times, gum-chewing layabout, and Dante (Brian O'Halloran) still his old whiny, sensible, weirdly-facial-haired, why-is-Randall-my-best-friend self. The action has moved from a burnt-down Quickstop to a McDonald's-style fast food restaurant where geeky, Jesus-loving Elias (Trevor Fehrman) and likeable, sexy manager Becky (Rosario Dawson) join in the service industry shenanigans. Jay and Silent Bob are back hanging and dealing outside the establishment, coolly observing the goings-on of its employees. Dante is again caught between two attractive women (surprising, Randall points out, for "the most hideous fucking chud [he's] ever met"): his fiance Emma (Kevin Smith's real-life wife, Jennifer Schwalbach) and his secret crush Becky. Randall is dealing with losing his best friend to marriage and a house in Florida. In the end, it's the rock-solid, peanut-butter-and-jelly camaraderie between Randall and Dante that brings everything together. With jokes!

As much as I love the first one, I think that the sequel is a more laugh-out-loud kind of funny. Plus new characters like Elias and Becky and Picklefucker are fantastic. A good amount of Star Wars, Transformers, racial slurs, New Jersey, and sexual acts are discussed, though much of the conversations are more reflective and life-focused (appropriate for the ages and situations of the main characters). Great use of music- more noticeable (at least to me) than in his previous movies, including a phenomenal, if slightly out-of-place dance number to Jackson 5's "ABC". The fact that this movie only exists because Kevin Smith promised Jason Mewes he would write another Jay and Silent Bob movie if the latter could stay off drugs heightens the bond between both Dante and Randall as it parallels Jay and Silent Bob's own friendship. Overall, great job, movie! Hilarious, but not without depth, and suitable for quoting with friends (but probably not with your parents).

4/5

(Nothing But) Flowers- The Talking Heads (from the great opening driving scene)