Review: ‘Kevin Smith 3-Movie Collection’ on Blu-ray
You have to admire Kevin Smith. Growing up in New Jersey, he found himself a circle of likeminded friends who took his scripts and performed them in a sort of comedy revue that wowed audiences in Red Bank. Inspired, he went on to Vancouver and film school where he met his producing muse, Scott Mosier. Back home, they scraped together $27,500, recruited Smith’s friends and shot the semi-autobiographical [[[Clerks]]]. The black and white film, mostly a series of vignettes tied together by the two leads, wowed audiences and became a cult hit.
From there, Smith got hired by Universal to make a second film, the $5 million [[[Mallrats]]] but Smith and the studio system clashed and the result was a critical and commercial dud. Still, Smith used many of his friends and made new ones, casting with a keen eye towards nascent (and cheap) talent. He also found a girlfriend, Joey Lauren Adams, and as we learn, a confluence of events led Smith to shoot [[[Chasing Amy]]] as his third film and second hit. Mallrats is now considered the multi-million dollar screen test.
Smith is good to his friends and apparently is a good director for actors, most of whom have stayed loyal despite going on to greater fame and fortune. He went on to direct the wonderful [[[Dogma]]] (which he wrote as his Clerks follow-up) which scared the beejeezus out of Miramax so they sold it off to Lionsgate and missed the cash. Instead, Smith gathered everyone once more for 2001’s [[[Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back]]], in some ways a farewell to the first chapter of his career.
We can watch the evolution of the director and some of his cast with the Kevin Smith 3-Movie Collection, out today from Buena Vista Home Entertainment which includes the Blu-ray debut of Clerks and Chasing Amy, plus Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. The three movies are individually packaged inside a cardboard box. Having never seen the bookend films, it’s interesting to watch how much surer a hand Smith has by the third film. Clerks is raw and very unpolished with genuinely horrible performances from the supporting cast. The writing is all over the place and you wonder how the clerks in question, Dante and Randal, maintain a friendship given what a screw-up the latter is. Still, Smith works in some harsh truths that give the movie its heart and soul. It’s truly the first close-up look at the slacker culture that exposes their wasted potential and lack of ambition.
After growing up from the little science-fiction show Gene
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It seems the least Ryan Sohmer and Lar DeSouza could do was offer a full scholarship.
Oh, not by the comic itself. The book reads well, is entertaining, puts our boy Stephen in a different place than he was, and the art by Emma Rios is fun and quirky, calling to Ditko without ever calling to Ditko.
A movie adaptation of author/producer Frank Beddor’s young adult book trilogy 
Today’s 18th Annual Baltimore Writers’ Conference will feature Mark Wheatley writer-artist of 
We missed posting something about this the other day but it’s still cool enough for us to talk about. The revival of Captain Action now means he can begin meeting the super-heroes his action figure incarnation transformed into. This begin in March with Moonstone’s release of Phantom Action, a crossover between King Feature’s classic comic strip hero, and Captain Action.
