How do Kevin Smith's films hold up now?
I’m a big fan of YouTuber Patrick H. Willems, who puts out really thoughtful, compelling film criticism. I especially appreciated his latest video, in which he re-watched a bunch of Kevin Smith’s earlier films, from 1994’s Clerks up to 2008’s Clerks II and tries to see if they still capture him the same way they did in his youth. (A bit of a warning: Willems’ videos are all bookended with some serialized “sketches,” I guess you could call them, that continue through all his videos — they barely make sense if you watch him regularly, and definitely won’t make sense if you’re new, so skip to the 2:51 mark to jump right into the Kevin Smith stuff.)
Like Willems, I adored Smith’s movies in my teens and early 20s — I owned almost all of his movies from 1994-2001 on DVD and would quote the Clerks TV show regularly. But while I’ll still always have a fond place in my heart for Smith’s early work, they just don’t affect me the same way anymore, and Smith never really grew as a filmmaker. Willems makes a great point that Judd Apatow kind of stepped into the place that Kevin Smith could have gone in the 2000s, and that there’s a universe where Smith is the one who made The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
How do y’all feel about Kevin Smith’s earlier work now? Do you still love them? Did you never love them? What do you think of his later work (or “work”)?
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