Our Generation Needs A Movie Like Clerks

Kevin Smith, just so you all know, is great. He's funny, clever, intelligent, offensive, and he gets it. (at least, all this, in his movie-making skills....really, I don't know the guy). What does he get? Life. Unfortunately, he's older than me, and he's making timely movies for a different generation.



Clerks and Clerks II are very very funny movies, but they are most successful with the crowd that is around the same age as the actors in the movie (which, I believe, are fairly close to the age of Kevin Smith himself). This is because it speaks to the issues those people were going through at the very time that the movies were released. Now of course, since I am now around the same age as the characters of the first movie, I can watch that movie and experience the same feelings as the people who were that age when it came out. And ten years from now, I can watch the second movie, and feel those feelings. But it just isn't the same as actually being that and feeling that when the movie itself is new. I feel left out. I feel like, hey, I'm going through what that movie's about, but you all share some sort of special connection with that movie because it grew with you, and I don't have that. I want a movie like that.



For those of you who haven't seen either of these movies, they are hilarious and very inappropriate. Don't watch them with your parents. But anyway, the first one is about two guys dealing with being only a few years out of high school, they're working crappy jobs (they are store clerks), they've got relationship drama going on, and they're trying to figure out what to do with their lives. They don't want to grow up, but they hate the position they are stuck in by not choosing to. Then, Clerks II takes place ten years later. They haven't really gone anywhere in life, and it's sort of the same issues as the first movie, only there's sort of a sadness overlaying the whole thing, because so much time has gone by. It's kind of worrying about wasting your life, and the issue of finally having to make that decision about what to do, because this is it, they're not young anymore and they don't have their whole lives to look forward to. It's about deciding what's right for your life, and sticking to it, no matter what....but you have to actually make a decision. Anyway, they are great movies, and so, so, so funny.



So my whole complaint here, is that I want to have a movie like this. I think everybody could use stuff like this, entertainment that grows with them and speaks to them about what they are going through, and at the time they are going through it. I mean you can always watch movies that are relevant to you whenever you want to watch them, but to have them be a part of pop culture at the same time as they are relevant to you....there's something special about that. There's somethign special about having a strong tie like that to a story.