I’m a big Kevin Smith fan, and I have enormous, unabashed love for his first five films (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back). His more recent installments have been a bit shakier – Jersey Girl didn’t work for me (though admittedly I haven’t seen it again since my disappointing first viewing in theatres when it came out), Clerks II and Zach & Miri Make a Porno both had some truly hilarious moments but also some unfortunate left-turns into schmaltz, and I skipped Cop Out (which Mr. Smith directed but didn’t write).

But not only are his early films phenomenal, they also boast some of the very best DVDs ever produced. Over the years Mr. Smith (working with the various studios involved) has released dynamite special editions of his films that are filled-to-overflowing with deleted scenes, gag reels, all sorts of making-of featurettes, and some of the funniest group commentary tracks ever recorded. I’m telling you, these commentaries are a scream, whether one is listening to the snoring of a passed-out-drunk Jason Mewes on the Clerks commentary (I’m not kidding) or to Ben Affleck’s spot-on impersonation of Denzel Washington in Malcolm X on the Chasing Amy commentary.

As often as I like to pop in one of Mr. Smith’s films to re-watch for the umpteenth time, I also often find myself sitting down to re-watch some of the marvelous special features. The recent blu-ray release of Clerks and Chasing Amy prompted me to check out several of the amazing making-of documentaries found on these discs.

First up was The Snowball Effect, a documentary about the seat-of-the-pants making of Clerks.

(This doc was first released on the Clerks X tenth anniversary DVD.) There are a lot of famous legends about the way Kevin Smith maxed out all of his credit cards to make Clerks with his friends in the convenience store where he worked. This doc covers all of those stories, but also goes a lot deeper into exploring just what prompted young Mr. Smith to decide that he was going to make a movie, and how this dude working in a convenience store went about making his dream a reality. It’s a pretty incredible story, made all the more incredible by this documentary’s in-depth recounting of all of the hurdles, large and small, that Smith (working with a tight group of co-conspirators including the man who would become his long-time producer, Scott Mosier) had to overcome. The documentary includes interviews with pretty much anyone and everyone involved in the making of Clerks, and doesn’t shy away from the juicy stories when all wasn’t quite well amongst Smith & the gang.

The new Clerks blu-ray also includes a never-before-released documentary (though it was made several years ago and has been shown at various film festivals) about the making of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, called Oh What a Lovely Tea Party. (That title is a reference to the punch-line of a crude joke in the film.) This film is comprised entirely of footage that Mr. Smith’s wife, Jennifer Schwalbach, shot on the set of Jay and Silent Bob – footage both of the filmmaking process and of her interviews with the film’s participants. This is an interesting documentary in that there is no narration, and no new talking-head interviews, to give the film a structure. Instead, it creates a you-are-there approach as the viewer is presented with this behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the film.  The doc has a very episodic feel, as we progress chronologically through the making of the film, bouncing every few minutes from the making of one sequence from Jay
and Silent Bob to the next. The “fly-on-the-wall” style of the documentary is its best quality, and there were times when it was truly fascinating to sit back and watch this intimate view of Smith & his team at work, having fun and screwing around. But the down-side to this approach is that there wasn’t any sort of momentum built up as the documentary progressed.  It’s just one sequence of behind-the-scenes footage after another, and as a result I started getting a bit bored after about 45 minutes.

Not to be out-done, the new Chasing Amy blu-ray also contains an elaborate new documentary. Tracing Amy (an excellent title that, of course, refers to the famous “you’re a tracer!” joke from the film) is one of the best making-of documentaries that I have ever seen on disc (and I’ve seen a lot of them!). It’s an engrossing, incredibly detailed look at every aspect of the making of this film. I’m pretty familiar with a lot of the stories from the making of Chasing Amy, following the commercial and critical failure of Mallrats, but this doc was filled with new stories and information that I had never heard before. As with The Snowball Effect, Tracing Amy contains exhaustive interviews with an enormous number of the major (and peripheral!) players in the film, both in front of and behind the camera. It’s a hoot – Mr. Smith and many of his team (especially Ben Affleck) are a riot as they re-tell the stories of the making of Chasing Amy. But it’s also really endearing to see how personally invested these people were in the making of that unique film. Tracing Amy is almost as long as the film it’s documenting, but I could have easily watched another hour of footage.

These types of special features are the reason that I love DVDs/blu-rays, and they exemplify the potential of this format. I really love getting all of the nitty-gritty inside scoop behind the trials and tribulations of the making of films that I love. I wish that more DVDs/blu-rays contained making-of documentaries that were put together with as much care and attention as these were. Simply marvelous.

Battlestar Galactica vets Hamie Bamber (Lee Apollo) and Tahmoh Penikett (Helo) will be together again on the season 2 premiere of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse! Click here for more details.

Speaking of Dollhouse, any interview with Mr. Whedon is always worth a look, and this piece contains some tantalizing glimpses at the unaired Dollhouse episode “Epitah 1″ (which screened at Comic-Con and sounds super-cool) as well as hints at a sequel to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (one of my favoritest things ever)!!

So wow, Capone over at AICN has a report from Peter Jackson covering about 10,000 upcoming projects, all of them enormously exciting!!  Click here to get an update on The Hobbit, District 9, The Lovely Bones, Tintin, and more!

The Sci-Fi channel (urg, I really don’t want to call it Sy-Fy) has posted video from all of its Comic-Con panels.  Perhaps, like me, you couldn’t care less to watch video of people talking about Stargate: Universe — but be sure to check out the full hour-long panel about Battlestar Galactica: The Plan and Caprica!

Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill will be lending their vocal talents to The Simpsons?  Awesome!  Here’s some additional info that came to light at Comic-Con on the season’s upcoming 20th (20 years!  Unbelievable!!) season.

I am disappointed, but not terribly surprised, to read that Kevin Smith might have to change the title of his upcoming buddy cop movie (starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan), A Couple of Dicks.

By all accounts, the Iron Man 2 panel was pretty awesome.  (Click here for a description.)  Why can’t some of this footage be found on-line??  Grrr.  But here’s another interesting tidbit of Marvel movie news: some hints about the line-up for the upcoming Avengers movie!  Some interesting choices.  I really hope that they use Millar/Hitch’s magnificent Ultimates series (which I reviewed here) as the basis for this film.

Since Comic-Con is also a place for news about, you know, comics, I’ll close with a piece of comic-book news that should get any true comic fan very excited:  Planetary #27 is finally being released in October!!!  Can it possibly live-up to the hype generated by the years-long delay?  We’ll see!

I’ve seen some very funny movies in the theatres lately, but let me tell you about the two best pieces of entertainment that I’ve seen this week:

Sold Out: A Threevening With Kevin Smith — Back in 2002, film-maker Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, etc…) released a two-DVD compilation of the best moments of five lengthy Q & A sessions he had held at various college campuses.  This little slice of comic genius was called An Evening With Kevin Smith.  It is a raucous, profane, and relentlessly entertaining four hours spent learning FAR more than you probably ever wanted to know about Kevin Smith’s life, career, show-biz interactions, and sexual habits.  The kids ask Smith questions on all sorts of topics, and he answers with surprising honesty and brilliant humor.  The man is a spectacular story-teller.  There are so many gems to be found on this DVD set (one of the most-watched in my large DVD collection), but my two favorites concern Smith’s experiences filming documentary footage for Prince (”Chaka mad?  Chaka real mad!”), and his lengthy tale of the year he spent, in the late 90’s, working on a Superman movie script for Warner Brothers.  In addition to being one of the funniest stories I have ever heard (as Smith goes into painful, hilarious detail of the ins and outs of trying to get the relaunch made in crazy Hollywoodland), that tale also serves to explain (to me, at least) why so many big-budget Hollywood movies wind up being so awful.  Oh, and the epilogue to the story, about Smith’s public fight with Tim Burton, is a classic as well.  Oh, OK, and I must also mention the tale of Smith’s first hook-up with the woman who would become his wife.  This story might sound innocuous, but it has to be heard to be believed.  (Remember what I wrote before about Smith’s honesty?  Let’s just say that it is on full display here.)

In 2006, Smith released An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder.  While bearing a phenomenal title, this set contained footage from just two Q & A shows, and as a result it was a bit weaker.  (There was less material to draw from.)  However, that’s not to say that there’s not a lot of fun to be had.  The discussion of Jason Mewes’ “half-half-whole” technique (which I will not explain any further here) in particular is a winner, and left me anticipating the hopeful future release of a third DVD set.

Which brings us to Threevening.  This double-DVD contains footage from just one show, but its a doozy: Kevin Smith’s celebration of his 37th birthday with an almost five-hour Q & A in his hometown of Red Bank, New Jersey.  In this installment, Smith tells stories about the making of Clerks II and his involvement in Die Hard with a Vengeance, but the highlight is a tale about jury duty and an anal fissure that is over an hour long, shockingly graphic, and also fall-on-the-floor hysterical.  

My only complaint: for some weird reason, a significant number of questions (mostly the questions that lead to a short answer from Smith) were edited out of the main feature, and instead placed as “special features” on the second disc.  Why was this done?  Why cut up the show?  (The edits are done smoothly — when watching the main feature I had no clue anything was missing.  But once I discovered it I was irritated, as I would have preferred to just have the whole show presented intact.)  There are a LOT of funny and interesting questions and answers in these “special features” scenes, so if you pick up this disc, be sure not to miss ‘em!

Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II — In the running for the best 23 minutes of television ever broadcast is last year’s Robot Chicken’s Star Wars Special.  That installment of Comedy Central’s stop-motion animated series mocked (with great love and also brutal, brutal honesty) George Lucas’ beloved series, and every moment of the very short run-time was pure gold.  My favorite bits included an ad for Admiral Ackbar Cereal (”Your tongues can’t repel flavor of this magnitude!”); a meeting of the Death Star officers deciding the best way to survive working with Darth Vader; Jar-Jar Binks’ reaction when he meets his beloved friend Ani, now Darth Vader; Boba Fett’s taunting monologue to a captured, Carbonite-encased Han Solo; and of course the opening sketch in which the Emperor on Coruscant receives a phone call from Vader, informing him of the destruction of the Death Star (”They blew it up?  Who’s THEY??  What the hell is an aluminum falcon??”)

Seeing as how I’ve watched my DVD of that first special about ten times, I was overjoyed to hear of a sequel, which aired on Comedy Central this past weekend.  I am pleased to report that great brilliance is once more on display.  The new sketches include a look inside Anakin Skywalker’s mind when he was massacring Jedi younglings in Episode III; Jar-Jar as a spokes-person for Gecko Auto Insurance; Storm-trooper Take Your Daughter to Work Day; what happened to Boba Fett after he was eaten by the Sarlacc; the reaction of Imperial officers after the end of Return of the Jedi (”What do you mean, the rebels won?  We still have tens of thousands of ships, and we control countless worlds!”); and of course another great Vader-Emperor phone call, this time a parody of their scene in Empire (”What is my bidding?  How about I bid you to stop ramming my ships into asteroid fields!!”).  If you love Star Wars then you owe it to yourself to catch a re-run of this (or to pick up the inevitable DVD release).  You won’t regret it.

In the new comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno, we witness the interesting collision of two comedy worlds.

Kevin Smith has been making raunchy comedies since his black-and-white, made-for-no-money-whatsoever debut film Clerks.  Although his subsequent films (Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jersey Girl, and Clerks II) have varied somewhat in tone (as well as quality), Kevin Smith has established a distinctive (and, for those of us who love his work, tremendously enjoyable) style to his films.  He has an ensemble of actors who have appeared regularly (Jason Mewes, Ben Affleck, Jeff Anderson, and many other familiar faces), and there’s a distinct cadence to his wonderful dialogue, which can be counted on to be chock full of obscure pop culture references, vulgarity and frank discussions of all-things sexual.  

It might not be so apparent, but Kevin Smith’s dialogue-focused films, featuring a lot of young people having one gloriously off-color conversation after another, were once quite ground-breaking.  (I can’t think of any movie, before Clerks, that had anything remotely similar to the famous “how many dicks did you suck” conversation.)  But in recent years it has been the films coming out from the Judd Apatow troupe (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, etc.) that have been taking up all of the comedy limelight, and pushing the envelope forward.  (Clerks is raunchy, but to me at least, Superbad is WAY raunchier.  Go ahead and re-watch the first five minutes of that movie and tell me I’m wrong.)

While everyone (myself included) has been singing the praises of Judd Apatow and everyone else involved in this recent wave of highly successful comedies, I don’t think quite enough attention has been paid to just how influenced these films have been by Kevin Smith’s work.  And so, as one watches Zack and Miri Make a Porno unfold, there is a lot of enjoyment to be found from the comedy circle completing itself, as we find so many familiar faces from the Apatow movies now starring in Kevin Smith’s latest film.  

The two headliners are, of course, Seth Rogen (who appeared in both Apatow TV series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, had a supporting role in The 40 Year Old Virgin, starred in Knocked Up, and co-wrote and co-starred in Superbad), and Elizabeth Banks (the “junk in the trunk” girl from The 40 Year Old Virgin who has been all over the place this year, most recently in W. and Role Models).  While several Smith regulars also appear in Zack and Miri, such as Jason Mewes (finally playing a character other than Jay) and Jeff Anderson (Randall from Clerks and Clerks II), Rogen and Banks also brought along several other actors from the Apatow circle.  There’s Gerry Bednob (Steve Carell’s shockingly profane Indian co-worker Mooj in The 40 Year Old Virgin) and, most notably, the phenomenal Craig Robinson (who had one scene in Knocked Up as the bouncer who wouldn’t let Leslie Mann and Katherine Heigl into his nightclub, and who has been knocking ‘em dead for several years now as the put-upon Darryl in The Office).

As one would hope from this “Worlds Collide” scenario, Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a) very raunchy, and b) very funny.  Kevin Smith’s last two films, Jersey Girl and Clerks II, both got a bit too schmaltzy for my tastes at times.  Fortunately, while there is some solid emotion to the character arc of the two main characters (something really not present in most of Smith’s early works, with the exception of Chasing Amy), Smith does a good job at keeping the tone of his film steady.  There are a few more serious moments, but they feel earned, and another big laugh is always just around the corner.

This isn’t groundbreaking the way Kevin Smith’s early films, and Judd Apatow’s recent films, have been.  Judging from the slow box office, this film doesn’t look like it’s making much of an impact on our pop-culture landscape.  But don’t let that keep you away!  It is thoroughly enjoyable film, and one that I can’t wait to see again when the DVD is released.

And if you’re looking to see something that I am quite certain you’ve never seen in a movie before, there is one scene fairly late in the movie that definitely fits the bill.  Oh, you’ll know it when you see it!

There’s a great, in-depth interview with Jon Favreau on his plans for Iron Man 2 (and 3!) to be found here.  Some really interesting tid-bits to be had.  I have a lot of faith in Favreau and am really excited to see what he and his team cook up over the next two years.

I love movie posters, and here’s one I think you might enjoy as well:  Kevin Smith has posted the new poster for Zach and Miri Make a Porno, his upcoming movie starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks.  If you follow that link, be sure to also scroll down a bit to see the poster design that the MPAA rejected.  Pretty funny, the both of them!

This is old news, but I’ve mean meaning to mention it:  Don LaFontaine passed away earlier this month.  Don’t recognize his name?  Well I guarantee you’d recognize his voice.  He’s the famed “trailer guy,” whose deep tones graced the narration of so many movie trailers over the years.  A fascinating trip-down-memory-lane sampling of his work can be found here.  

Hope to see everyone back here tomorrow!