The San-Diego Union-Tribune – “Average Hero” (** SPOILERS **)

“…Smith said there isn’t anyone for whom he’d stand in line. Then, reconsidering: “I’d line up for Jesus,” he said, “for an hour. Well, it’s Jesus, maybe an hour and a half.”

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Coming Soon – “Clerks II: A Return to the Counter Culture” (** SPOILERS **)

“…Chicks I think will totally dig it,” insists Rosario Dawson, who claims that taking her to see this movie on a date would be a tremendous idea (if she were single). By the end of the night, “I would be like, ‘I’m yours!’”

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Page Six – “Shelf Restocked” (** SPOILERS **)

“…It’s far more accomplished than anything I’ve done before,” Smith says. “It brings to bear all the things – the wisdom, experience and knowledge that we got in making six movies. It all folded into one flick, and it really represents the best I could be as a filmmaker.”

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Pulse – “Clerks II: An interview with Kevin Smith”

“…You laugh your ass off with the movie,” he said. “But then it goes into this really emotional place about the kind of heterosexual same-sex marriages that guy best friends are in that are really just one step shy from being actual flat-out gay relationships.”

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Suite 101 – “Trevor Fehrman on Clerks II”

“…People ask me how do you come up with roles,” Fehrman said. “For me, I guess they expect it to be some like DeNiro-esque or Johnny Depp like they really think about it right out of the whole Stanislavski form, whatever that is. I’m not that complicated a guy. So how I came up with this character, all I can say is a couple of the mannerisms came from a couple people I know. It’s sort of a cross between my friend Paul from Long Beach who’s like the best guy in the world, but people always think that I’m describing him as stupid. He’s not stupid. He’s smart.”

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Suite 101 – ” Jason Mewes on Clerks II”

“…Now with a shortly cropped do, Jason Mewes’ follicles must grow pretty quickly because he was able to use his real hair for Jay in Clerks II. “When Kevin said we’re going to shoot, I started letting it grow again. It wasn’t this short. It was a little longer than this, but I started letting it grow and didn’t cut it until we shot. And then when we were done, I cut it off again; but that’s my real hair.”

If you’re a fan of Clerks, the convenience-store slacker comedy made for $27,000 that, in 1994, established Kevin Smith as the who-needs-a-budget-when-you’ve-got-attitude? auteur of his generation, then you’ll probably want to see Clerks II. Yet it’s precisely devotees of the Smith universe (porn jokes, cruddy camera angles, surprise flights of grunge eloquence, more porn jokes) who have a right to be wary of a Clerks sequel. Can Smith, after finding fame and fortune beyond the mini-mall parking lots of New Jersey, now successfully revive the talky, dead-zone limbo of postadolescent wage slaves whose lives are going nowhere? Can he recapture the store-as-movie-set authenticity of the original film? How about its innocently sacrilegious horndog wit?

The answer, of course, is that Kevin Smith can recapture all of this — or, at least, enough of it to make Clerks II an agreeable mischievous romp instead of a rip-off — because he never truly abandoned it in the first place. Clerks II, unlike Clerks, has been shot in color and given the semblance of a plot — will Dante Hicks grow up into a responsible citizen? — but really, the movie, like Clerks, is a low-budget excuse for talk: dirty talk, dorky talk, obsessive pop-culture talk (which is better, The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars?), great gushing geysers of talk, much of it prickly and obscene and hilarious and, in that Kevin Smith way, so smart about being stupid that the characters’ verbosity becomes, in every sense, their saving grace.

In Clerks II, the Quick Stop has been closed down due to a fire. Dante (Brian O’Halloran), the neurotically rational, wheel-spinning underachiever who looks like Charlie Sheen after being whacked with a geek stick, and Randal (Jeff Anderson), that spiky, even less evolved specimen of dedicated…uh, randiness, now work the counter of a Mooby’s fast-food franchise. They wear goofy purple uniforms that, if possible, mock their status even more than the Godot-at-the-Ring Dings-rack atmosphere of the convenience store did. Slinging burgers and onion rings to the rare customer who wanders into the place, they jabber, in their nothing-matters/everything-matters way, about such vital topics as Transformers, the Proustian joy of go-carts, the issue of whether two particular body parts should ever meet during sex, and also whether either of these two human zeds plans to get, you know, a future.

Dante, at least, wants one. At 33, he has a tawny, domineering fiancée (Jennifer Schwalbach), and he’s planning to go with her to Florida, where he’s to spend his life running a car wash. The complicating factor is Dante’s boss, played by Rosario Dawson — convincing as a rival love interest, though not necessarily as the manager of a Mooby’s. The romantic plot is standard-issue, but the real love story — the one between Dante and Randal — is brought to a satisfying, even touching, conclusion. And I haven’t even mentioned the donkey sex, or the way Jay (Jason Mewes), with boom-box backup from Silent Bob (Smith), massages his nips as he replays the killer’s dance from The Silence of the Lambs. Talk about touching.

Los Angeles Times: “Back To Mining The Store” (** MINOR SPOILERS **)

“…Each flick I’ve done is kind of a snapshot of where I was in my life when I wrote it; ‘Clerks II’ really speaks to where I am in life at the moment. You don’t have to be an analyst to look at the movie and go, ‘The Quick Stop means a little more than the Quick Stop, and Florida represents something more than just going to Florida.’ That’s kind of where I am. There’s definitely something bittersweet about arriving at ‘Clerks II.’”

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NPR: “Don’t Miss: Kevin Smith Clocks In With Clerks II”

“…mith is funny, but unexpectedly touching when talking about the unambitious but utterly human individuals who inspire his movies. “Someone’s got to sell me the milk, dude,” he tells Inskeep. “Not everyone shoots for the moon… some people are happy to scrape by.”

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WWeek: “Kings Of Convenience” (** MINOR SPOILERS **)

“…Surprisingly, the film works, and, in its own way, shows that Smith has matured in a way that all his other films were never able to convey. “I wasn’t wholly convinced. After I saw the screening, I gave a big sigh,” says Anderson.”

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CanMag: “Nudity In Clerks II” (**SPOILERS**)

“…According to new clerk Trevor Fehrman, Mewes will whip it out any time. “It’s hard to not to feel intimate with a group of people when within days of meeting someone, you’ve seen their testicles,” said Fehrman. “Mewes will show you his testicles with very little coaxing. And I don’t know why. It’s not like they’re particularly beautiful. I don’t get what the deal is.”

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Suite 101: “Kevin Smith’s Upcoming Projects”

“…Evening Harder is being moved to December. They’re going to delay it until Clerks II comes out on DVD and release it at the same time. So you’ll see two versions of the Lord of the Rings thing, the one I do and the one Randall does.”

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai – (1984) “One of the most genius, inventive flicks ever made. From the almost seamless inclusion of the Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio broadcast into the film’s mythology to the mannered performances and the all-synth score, it’s a classic.”

Baby, It’s You (1983) – “First time I went to the movies and thought, ‘They’re talking about us,’ was this John Sayles movie about the star-crossed school couple. She’s middle-class Jewish [Rosanna Arquette]; he’s working-class Italian [Vincent Spano].”

Cop Land (1997) – “A New Jersey I recognize. Highlands, where I grew up, was a lot like the New York policeman’s paradise in that De Niro/Stallone flick, with more bars and fewer officers per square mile than anywhere else in the world.”

Garden State (2004) – “Dug it. Natalie Portman was so-o-o-o-o adorable. Where was that girl when I grew up in Jersey? Not interested in me.”

The Sopranos – “OK, not a movie, but the ultimate Jersey experience, all turnpike and ‘burbs.”

Asked whether he was still thinking about directing, Smith said, “No, it really comes down to I’m really not talented enough to pull off a movie like that. It was between that and ‘Clerks II’ and I drove toward ‘Clerks II’ in such a big, bad way and almost had to fight Harvey Weinstein to do ‘Clerks II’ as opposed to a ‘Green Hornet’ movie, cuz he’s like, ‘it’s time for you to grow and stretch as a filmmaker’ and I’m like, ‘doesn’t anybody get it after twelve years? I’m not that talented. This is what I do [well].’ This is why I got into film, to tell stories like that. I love watching comic book movies. I’d love to watch a ‘Green Hornet’ movie, but would not want to be the guy at the helm of that movie. Number one, I make one of those movies and I lose the right to make fun of other people for making those movies. I learned that the hard way making ‘Jersey Girl.’ I can’t make fun of ‘Raising Helen’ anymore. If I raise one finger to ‘Raising Helen,’ people are like, ‘dude—you made Jersey Girl.’ But number two, that’s not the story I like to tell. I like to tell stories about people sitting around and talking to each other and what not. And that’s really what I’m kind of good at and most people would argue that I’m not even that good at that to begin with. So the notion of doing ‘Green Hornet’ is just not appealing to me. In comic book form—wonderful. I love to write comic books. You don’t have to think about shooting that sh*t, plus you can get into the inner life of a character, you can deal with years of continuity, you can drop reference to a story that happened fifteen years ago. Doing that in the mainstream on a feature basis is just not the same.”

San Bernadino Sun: “Jason Mewes Doing It Clean And Sober”

“…The big difference this time was I was waking up early and looking forward to working. And I’d hang out after.”

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CanMag: “Smith on Clerks II”

“…Jason Lee, we got lucky because Jason was able to make time in his very busy Earl schedule for that scene and that was something that originally Matt [Damon] was going to do, but then Matt was off shooting a Robert DeNiro movie and so Jason stepped in and thankfully pulled it off.”

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E! Online: “Kevin Smith on Clerks II” (**SPOILERS**)

What do you think about being the screenwriter for Aquaman 2 on Entourage?

“I think they owe me a part now. They’ve taken two shots at me–one last season, one this season. Now, I think I should show up on the actual f–kin’ show and slap Ari Gold.”

An Afternoon with Kevin Smith
Date: September 23rd, 2006
Location: Central Florida
Venue: Orange County Convention Center, West Building
Price: $35.00