Clerks. (1994)

A lot of people talk with me about film (or I talk to them, rather) and assume that my love of auteurism envelops my taste and makes me disregard the mainstream altogether. I would say that I have a fondness for the eclectic, but that only goes so far. Really, what I look for in a movie is a statement, a purpose, a sense of direction. My favorite films are those that know exactly what they want to be and what they want to say, and those that succeed in presenting that vision to their audience. They don't have to be revolutionary, they just need to be honest.

"Clerks." is about as honest a film as they come and I enjoyed it very much. It presents a day in the life of two hapless clerks named Dante and Randall as they eek out their minimum wage lives doing God knows what. I was immediately reminded of "Office Space" which came out five years after "Clerks.", but is an obvious and loving descendant of this film about the angry youth fixed in a life of seeming repetition. This is for every young man who worked a thankless job, half-heartedly putting in the equivalent effort of what the job gave him in return, and who made problems out of nothing simply to break up the monotony.

Dante is called in on his one day off to man a dumpy little convenience store. Next door to him is Randall who pretends to manage a video store. The two talk film, fight with customers, bicker about relationships and the fact that their lives are going nowhere. They are every 22-year-old and they are hilarious. Along their mishap-filled day the two play hockey on their roof, disrupt a wake, and inadvertently aide in a case of necrophilia. It's absurd, but what can you do? As seemingly dull their days might be they are people nonetheless, and people hate boredom.

The star of the film is its writer, Kevin Smith, who was also its director. This was obviously a first film endeavor and he certainly didn't have the technical skills nor the cast to make this a "good" piece of cinema. But the man is sharp as a tack and has obviously been a Dante, a Randall, a Jay, a Silent Bob. Smith's words are witty, his characters are spot on, and it is all too clear that he's smoked his fair share of the green stuff in the alley behind whatever convenience store he used to work at. In fact, he probably worked their at the same time he made this film just to pay for its minimal production costs.

There is just something really pure about a film that doesn't intend to create. All "Clerks." wants to do is show a group of people who would never normally be shown, doing things that nobody would ever care to watch. It's both a celebration and a damnation of all things that make a young person's life both great and terrible, with all the sex, drugs and rock n' roll that go along with it. It is both exuberant and apathetic, muddied yet exact in its depiction; it's a real conundrum and it is fascinating.

The punctuation mark in its title is as stark and definite as the black and white that it is shot in. Our wise Randall tells Dante and every bonehead new adult in the audience, "Shit, or get off the pot." This film definitely shits, and what a movement it is.

3/4