After roughly 2 years, I finally got the chance to watch Clerks III Wednesday night. The movie enjoyed a limited, theatrical run, relatively speaking. In addition, it was available on cable through STARZ, a premium channel that I do not have. I saw Clerks III listed on the Roku channel, so I checked it out.
Just to set the record clear: I love the original Clerks. Back in 1994, Kevin Smith became a hero to every film geek/comic book fanboy walking the Earth. Briefly went to film school and decided to turn his own script into a feature-length movie. He raised $27,500 to finance the project by maxing out his credit cards and selling his comic book collection.
Pelosi who’ve never heard of it, or seen it, clerics is the story about two best friends who work in a convenient store and adjoining video store, respectively. There, day-to-day life at work while they try to find some great meeting with his otherwise a pretty mundane existence. at the time, I was just graduating from high school myself and getting ready to come into my own. So this movie spoke to me. And a true independent, filmmaker fashion, it was shot in black-and-white and part two on color correcting but also to look as if it was shot through a black-and-white security camera that one might find in a convenience store.
After making several other movies, most of which were also set in Smith’s “view askew-niverse” Smith return to the place where it all began in 2002’s Clerks 2. The showed us an older and it still equally aimless Dante and Randall and with both men purchasing the convenience store in which they both worked in the first movie. To well enough, but it failed to capture the same magic, the same energy that the original Clerks possessed. Maybe it really was because Clerks was made at a particular time, not just in life, but in history. It’s nearly impossible to recapture that.
Needless to say, when clerks three was announced, I was very excited to catch up with Dante, Randall, and the other inhabitants of the quick stop convenience store. I had been reading some of Kevin Smith‘s post on social media; knowing full well that the movie was going to follow Dante and Randall at the next shake in their lives. This made sense to me as I feel like in a lot of ways I grew up with these movies.
Smith had one script for clerks three in mind; but then real life advance compel him to rewrite the movie. Smith, of course, suffered a near fatal heart attack, which led him to lose a lot of weight, take better care of himself healthwise, and I think gave him some of those deep existential thoughts that we all confront when we are faced with a near death experience.
Just as imitates life, Clerks III was rewritten to be reflect Kevin Smith own real-life heart attack. The movie begins with Dante and Randall working at the Quickstop convenience store; only for Randall to suffer a heart attack. He’s in the hospital, Randall begins to question or direction of his life. He decides that he wants to make a movie; more specifically about his life. What ultimately becomes of it is the story that we’ve already seen in clerks one and 2.
The movie-within-the-movie sees virtually every actor from the original Clerks reprise their roles, playing themselves. Rosario Dawson reprises her role as Dante’s wife, Rebecca in a very pivotal part of the movie. I don’t want to say too much, but the ending is a little bit shocking.
FINAL TAKE: recommended for fans of the franchise. Like any film series it would not only be difficult to jump into the series at this stage, but the movie would lose most of its emotional impact.
Clerks III is currently streaming on Roku.
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- The Extra Day: A Ten-Year Memory
The article “Rob’s Retro Review: Clerks III first appeared in Rebuilding Rob.
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