SModcast 20: Here Comes the Bride –

In which the sausage party is crashed by a sausage patty, the feminine touch is heavily felt throughout, a de facto marriage counseling session ensues, uncomfortable sexual revelations are made, and made, and made some more.

Enjoy SModcast, exclusively at Quick Stop Entertainment!

George Lucas has long cultivated an interactive relationship with the geekerati on all things Lucasfilm, especially “Star Wars.” Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones 4” approach derives from the Lucas DIY ethic. “They’re keeping their fan base happy until the movie comes out,” says web-savvy director Kevin Smith. “‘Indiana Jones is presold, man! That audience is coming.”


Early Internet adopter Smith learned about a group of “Clerks” fan sites back in 1996 when he was depressed after “Mallrats” bombed. Reading the commenters buoyed his spirits. He hired one of the site creators to build his first site. When Smith suggested doing a weekly live Q&A, he was told all he had to do was join the site’s message boards and chat with his fans directly whenever he felt like it. Ever since, Smith spends several hours a week with fans. He’s proud that the site has grown organically, adding merchandise when fans demand it. Smith uses his year-old MySpace page, which boasts more than 172,000 friends, to announce book-signings and public appearances, which promptly sell out. “I don’t organize with the studio at all,” he says. “It’s about letting us do whatever we want.”

Listening to your fans can be both good and bad, Smith says. “It’s not Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times, it’s what the guy who paid for your pic has to say,” says Smith. “You have to keep in perspective that you can’t believe the enthusiastic positive stuff or the shitty horrible soul-crushing stuff. The truth is between the two.”

KEVIN SMITH
The Fairly Odd Filmmaker

silentbobspeaks.com

ANGLE: Diary, comedic op-ed, and plugs for his ”SModcast” podcasts and live appearances.

HIGH POINT: It’s a tie between a happy-birthday greeting for his wife (”From a one-night-stand to my partner and soul mate. You boggle my mind, you fill my heart, you race my blood, you take my breath away”) and a series of e-mails between Smith and a writer from The Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi debating whether Alanis Morissette sang a tune called ”One of Us.” (Smith was right — she didn’t.)

LOW POINT: After famously attacking film critic Joel Siegel for walking out of a Clerks II screening, Smith repents when he discovers that the spat is mentioned in a Siegel obituary.

VERDICT: Smith calls his diary ”My Boring-Ass Life”; it’s apropos, given that much of it addresses subjects such as his diet and his man-crush on Bruce Willis. Nonetheless, fans will appreciate his candor.

GRADE: A-

The blog’s been around for quite a while now, and continues to evolve to reflect the current atmosphere at View Askew and in Kevin’s life. We expect the blog to continue for many years, and look forward to all the great “Zack & Miri” news that we’re gonna see in there in the coming months.

SModcast 19: We Owe It All to Nook-Nook – In which our heroes broadcast from a talking house, get their Trek on, briefly interrupt the proceedings to do some work, suss out why they never abused the casting couch, debate an indecent proposal, brag about oral proficiencies gone to waste, marvel over the frigid, define love, and hail the first cro-magnon sexual astronaut…

Get on over at grab your own personal copy! As always, listener discretion is advised.

And hey, while you’re over at Quick Stop Entertainment, check out some of the other great exclusives there — It really is an amazingly cool site full of content — Including a new epsidoe of Paul Dini’s entertaining “Monkey Talk”. You just can’t go wrong with puppets.

Instead of pushing off from the critical success of Clerks, Kevin Smith made a film that proved he might actually be the voice of a generation, if Generation X was the lazy, unmotivated bunch of bums some claimed it to be. The characters in Mallrats occupy some neutral zone between junior high and college, and instead of the relatively accurate, if exaggerated dialogue of his debut, they all spew the verbose fantasties and monologues which would later be proven as Smith’s de facto m.o. The only time the dialogue works this time is during the game show finale, where I have to admit it’s actually funny as hell, even if Jason Lee’s jabs at Brian O’Halloran amount to shooting fish in a barrel. “I should know — we can smell our own,” gets me every time.

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