Studio City Sneak
There are four things you have to do in creating a good, entertaining dumb comedy. One, make sure the audience knows that however moronic and clueless the characters may seem, the people behind the camera are very bright and hip. Two, make it seem as if the actors, too, are in on the joke. Three, make sure the movie is self-aware, with an understanding of its own comic attitude. And last but not least, make it funny.

You can find all of this in Kevin Smith’s new comedy, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (Dimension, August 24), which I saw Wednesday afternoon. Smith let me view it on a large monitor inside the Jay and Silent Bob bungalow on the CBS/Studio City lot.

It’s Kevin Smith by way of Jerry Seinfeld — a freewheeling, fringe-y little sitcom about nothing. Nothing substantive, I mean, which is exactly what I liked about it. It’s the brainy, acerbic Smith freed from the dark undertones that have influenced his films in the past. There’s no convenience-store ennui (Clerks), no relationship anguish (Chasing Amy), no corrosive anti-Catholic lampooning (Dogma) — just a glide-along attitude that cuts up and makes you laugh and feel relaxed.

It’s not entirely content-less. Jay and Silent Bob takes pot shots at Gen-X slackers, Hollywood, Miramax Films, Ben Affleck, Internet geeks, and the notion of gay oral sex. In fact, if you removed the blow-job jokes, the movie would probably be about 20 to 25 minutes shorter. In fact, if Jay and Silent Bob is about anything, it’s about the deep-down, white-knuckle terror Smith feels about oral-genital contact between males.

Then again, if you break humor down to the psychological rudiments, it stops being funny. I laughed or smirked at almost every blow-job joke. Does that make me a homophobe?

The story’s basically about money and power, and the abuse of same. It’s about Smith’s long-standing comic duo (played by Jason Mewes and himself) making a cross-country trek from New Jersey to Hollywood to try to stop Miramax Films from making a film based on Bluntman and Chronic, comic-book characters who are based on themselves. Jason Lee’s Banky Edwards character (last seen in Chasing Amy) has sold the rights to Miramax, but without cutting Jay and Silent Bob in.

Jason Mewes plays Jay — the talking (one could say mouthy) half of the duo — with total gravitas. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but it’s like he’s playing Hamlet. Mewes says every inane or asinine line with fierce emotional conviction. If this had been made in 1950 and they hired Marlon Brando to play Jay, the result wouldn’t have been very different. Smith handles his silent role with the usual aplomb, although he allows himself two verbal outbursts that are sort of riveting.

Smith’s script is so wise-ass and ahead-of-the-game, he has his characters voice every criticism any naysayer might want to use against it. Not long after he introduces an orangutan for some easy laughs, he has director Wes Craven — appearing in a brief cameo performance — explain that “market research says that people love monkeys.”

It’s all like that. The whole thing plays like one big fraternal in-joke. The dialogue is all asides, cushion shots, and carpings.

Jay and Silent Bob also has something that no Kevin Smith movie has had before — visual energy. For a guy whose idea of mise en scene used to be based on putting a camera on a tripod, rolling film, and then having his actors walk into the frame, it’s a genuine step forward. There are crane shots, chase scenes, CGI shots, guys falling through windows, a Charlie’s Angels parody scene … it never lets up. The widescreen photography by Jamie Anderson (The Gift, Grosse Pointe Blank) doesn’t call attention to itself, exactly, but it isn’t lazy either.

Renee Humphrey co-stars as Jay’s love interest, Tricia. Will Ferrell has a small part as a federal wildlife marshall. There are cameos from Chris Rock, Jason Biggs, James Van Der Beek, George Carlin (delivering the best blow-job routine in the whole film), Joey Lauren Adams, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Jon Stewart, Shannen Dougherty, and Alanis Morissette.

Ben Affleck has two scenes — one as the cartoonist he played in Chasing Amy (sans goatee) and one as himself — and he’s better here than he was in the whole of Pearl Harbor. I kept asking myself, why couldn’t Jerry Bruckheimer’s writers manage to give Affleck’s Rafe McCawley character at least some of the wit and charm he shows here?

My favorite bit: a back-and-forth between Affleck and Matt Damon in Act Three that makes fun of their recent career moves. My second-favorite: a closing montage in which Jay and Silent Bob deliver some violent payback to guys who’ve posted harsh critical slams about them on the Internet.

I know what you’re thinking. Wells is sucking up to Smith because he got an advance peek. All I can say is, some people who caught last week’s research screening in San Diego seem to agree. 86% of them gave it an excellent or very good score, which isn’t stratospheric but is pretty damn high for a movie that isn’t a big event, mass-market entertainment.

As Smith himself wrote on his View Askew site last week, “We have never received scores like that. The highest Dogma ever scored was a 60% or 65% in the top two boxes, with a 35% to 40% definite recommend. Chasing Amy was somewhere in that range as well. The Dimension folks informed me that these were some of the highest numbers not only in their history, but also Miramax’s.

“And in terms of who made up the audience, only 14% of the group had seen all four of the prior flicks. So it wasn’t like we screened to a group of total fans — we were screening to fresh faces.”

Are there any weak parts? Stuff that doesn’t quite work? Yeah, but I’m too much of a toady and a suck-up to mention them.

Why did Kevin give me a private screening? A couple of reasons, I suspect, but the main one, he said, was because he felt I took it in the neck unfairly over that Ben Affleck/Dogma story I wrote for Mr. Showbiz in the summer of ‘98.

I used Affleck’s remarks about the political situation at Disney to support reports I’d heard that Disney didn’t want Miramax to distribute Dogma for fear of protests from Christian activists. The story turned out to be true, of course, but when it first came out I came under fire. From Affleck, especially, who trashed me and called me a chucklehead. So this was a little payback, Smith told me. “Fair enough,” I replied.

Dimension will be staging another test-screening in Arizona on June 13 or 14, with the idea this time to show it solely to non-fans. Jay and Silent Bob had been slated for an early August break, but they didn’t want to go mano a mano with Rush Hour 2 so they retreated to August 24. I don’t think they have much to be scared of.