Not much to say today actually, a pretty dreary time here in Central PA…Lots of rain in the forecast. Let’s just hope that it all clears up by the weekend, at least at the beach!

Tonight the Flyers will attempt to put an end to the New Jersey Devils’ hockey season with a playoff win that will take them to the Stanley Cup Finals! Very exciting stuff. The boys are playing great. In other TV news, the season finale season is upon us, though there’s not much in the way of real cliffhanger type stuff going on this year. X-Files probably posted one of its best episodes of the season last night, too bad it took so long to GET that good. Though shades of the finale also seemed eerily similar to the series finale of Twin Peaks (shaking limbs, the disappearance of the show’s main character, a “gateway” hidden in the woods a-la the Black Lodge), it was still a damned good episode with some developments that, if the show pursues them rather than ignores them for weeks at a time, will make for a good season next year, which we assume will be the show’s last. They’d better stick with conspiracies and aliens and the “mythology” a lot more next season to keep viewers though. Fox, are you listening?

Anyway, sorry to get off on a rant about the show. We know you’re here for View Askew news and that’s just what we’ve got. With Clerks just 9 days from airing, there’s of course some buzz around the net on the show (all positive, too, at least the stuff we’ve seen), and a couple other items of interest. Again, mostly newsbites today, but hey, Saturday was a fairly busy update so at least we don’t feel like this is ALL we’ve been doing. Let’s have a look here:

A big thanks to Britt for getting us the text of all the View Askew & Kevin Smith related items in last week’s way cool 10th anniversary issue of Entertainment Weekly. Not only was it a really fun and well-assembled issue, but there was a ton of stuff we wanted to post here, as well. Here’s a page by page breakdown:

• Sound Bites – 1997 (pg. 15): “He’s a consummate actor… His hairline can be fixed.” Director Kevin Smith, on the befuddling proposition to cast Nicolas Cage as Superman 5/16
• Sound Bites – 1999 (pg. 16): “White meat. The breast. Though actually, I’m more of an a–man, so I should propbably like dark meat better.” Ben Affleck, on his Thanksgiving preferences. 11/26
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (pg. 26): It was 1991, and things were looking grim. Kevin Smith, not yet the Slurpee auteur behind Clerks and Chasing Amy, was 20 years old, living in New Jersey, and weighing the prospect of a long and dutiful career in the American service sector. “I assumed that maybe one day I would buy into a deli or a convenience store, and I’d run that,” he remembers. “Because that was about the only thing I knew how to do.”
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (pg. 27): On his 21st birthday, Smith drove into Manhattan to check out an odd, rambling little film called Slacker – and had an epiphany. “Oh, I would like to do this. If this counts as filmmaking, I want to be a filmmaker too. I can do this,” he thought. “This was the first true independent film I’d ever seen.”
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (same page): ……Within months, Smith was starting work on a raunchy $28,000 comedy called Clerks,…
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (pg. 34): … Kevin Smith remembers the time he and his partner, producer Scott Mosier, needed film stock to shoot Clerks. They could buy a reel at a 15 percent discount as long as they flashed a student ID. Slight hitch: Neither guy was a student. So Smith headed over to the New School for Social Research in New York City. “I looked through the catalog to find a one-day course,” he remembers. “There were two. One was Understanding Your Homosexuality. The other was Roasting Suckling Pig. I understood my homosexuality just great, so I quickly signed up for Roasting Suckling Pig. I got my student ID and I went back uptown to Kodak.” The store sold him the celluloid. “Then I quickly went back downtown and dropped the course and got my $45 back,” he says.
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (same page): …Smith still laughs when he looks back to a panicky early screening of Clerks in 1993. “I remember sitting there in the theater and being blown away by how filthy the f—in’ movie was,” he says. “Just sitting there in public watching the characters constantly saying ‘f— f— f—’ and talkin’ about sex. And I remember goin’, ‘Oh God, what have I done? This is a joke that went too far. I can’t believe I spent 28 grand on this filthy f—in’ movie. I’m in debt! This was stupid! Nobody’s going to watch this!’ ” He was wrong. Now, Smith says, “people go, ‘Hey, man, Clerks was the movie that made me want to be a filmmaker.’ Somewhere down the road, one of those people that saw Clerks, they’re going to make The Great American Film.”
• Top 5 triumphs for New Jersey (pg. 66): #2 Kevin Smith’s Garden State-based Clerks released (1994)
• Theme No. 3: Sincerity vs. Irony (pg. 78): …Kevin Smith’s 1999 flick Dogma (in which Linda Fiorentino takes a leave of absence from an abortion clinic to battle satanic poo monsters for Jesus) incited full-fledged picketing.
• Theme No. 4: Break Throughs (pg. 84): Chris Rock is given a short bio and props from Nelson George, author of Hip Hop america (great book)
• Theme No. 5: Cults (pg. 105): Ben Affleck’s film bio is given in 4 segments: Humble Origins…(Became a Kevin Smith regular with Mallrats, chasing Amy, and Dogma), Crossed Over..(..with his Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting,…), Arrived…, True to His Roots..
• Theme No. 6: Size (pg. 112): Short article on Bob and Harvey Weinstein sale of Miramax Films to Disney for an estimated $60 million in April 1993.
• The EW index (pgs. 172-174): Tally of people on EW covers: Matt Damon (12 times), Ben Affleck (6 times), Chris Rock (5 times), Salma Hayek (one time), Alan Rickman (one time), and alas, Kevin Smith (zero times, but there’s still time!).

• Kevin and Ben’s kiss was featured on the show MTV Movie Awards Uncensored this past weekend. One of the producers told the story of how Ben and Kevin didn’t even want to look at the copy the MTV producers had scripted for them and assured them they had something that MTV would be happy with, and the producer goes on to say that “Ben plants one on Kevin” and the crowd goes wild. And while she says this, they show the actual act, and then cut to a reaction shot of Heather Graham and Edward Burns of all people. His reaction was a pained smile.
• Online animation magazine Animation Blast have received all the Clerks TCS episodes on tape, and reviewed them all. They loved the show, and had nothing but good things to say. We’re also anticipating the arrival of the episodes ourselves, and hope to have our own reviews of each show up soon for you as well (spoiler protected, of course).
• In more Clerks:TCS news, the “Mutant Reviewers From Hell” have set up their own website dedicated to the show, which you can see HERE. They plan to review each show as it airs.
• In today’s final Clerks TCS bit, TV show ZDTV mentioned the official Clerks: The Cartoon website and added it to their big list on a recent episode. The host then went on to badmouth the show a bit, we hear, but we’re willing to bet he’d yet to even see an episode.
• Kevin’s the subject of the comic book parody column “You’ll All Be Sorry” over at the Comic Book Resources website today, him supposedly writing a fictitious letter into the column with their own “Miss Manners” responding rather scathingly.
• Finally today, it appears that God herself, Alanis Morissette, has another acting gig…And this time she gets to do a lip-lock with Sarah Jessica-Parker on HBO’s “Sex & The City”. Yowza.

See ya next time, folks.