Dangerous eleisons (9/28/01)
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Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. [Kevin Smith, 2001.]
The world’s oldest eighth graders, dislodged from the front of the convenience store before which [it is revealed in flashback] they have been posed since their hippie stoner mothers abandoned them there in infancy, learn that unscrupulous parties have sold the rights to their legend to the dream merchants of Miramax; take umbrage; and make a pilgrimage to Hollywood, that it may feel their wrath.
Once committed to the road, they meet Shannon Elizabeth, go down on Carrie Fisher [here playing a nun], learn the essentials of the hitchhiker’s craft from George Carlin, fall in with some major-babe jewel thieves who are posing as ecoterrorists [unless it was the other way around], adopt an orangutang who turns in what is easily the best performance in the picture, meander at some length through a weird landscape littered with cactus and boulders and inhabited by yokels with phony accents which apparently represents the conception of the western United States held by the typical dumbshit from New Jersey who’s never actually been there but only flown over it to get to LA, and arrive finally in Tinseltown, where they fight a lightsaber duel with Mark Hamill, study Van Sant and Damon and Affleck at work on
Good Will Hunting II: Hunting Season [this was almost funny], run into Shannen Doherty and the dweebs from
American Pie, dispense some useful tips on anal hygiene, and indulge the auteur’s fondness for quotation from the Hollywood canon, including, I guess,
ET,
The Fugitive, the
Star Wars movies, and, of course, himself. Probably all this allusiveness is supposed to indicate a deep appreciation of the history of the cinema, but instead it comes across as namedropping; and all the starlet cameos, incidentally, are transparently just a device to allow the author to make the acquaintance of hot chicks.
True to form, Mr. Smith’s alter ego utters barely a grunt for ninety or a hundred minutes, confining his exertions to what is apparently supposed to be physical comedy [though he reminds us very little of Keaton or Harold Lloyd or even Fatty Arbuckle], while the other participants attempt an exhaustive enumeration of the 5040 permutations of the seven words you used to be unable to use on television [the screenplay must literally read “1256473”, “7345126”, “4613275”, etc.] — before [as we expect] he speaks the moral with a remarkable fluency which reminds us, finally, how capable a writer he really is; or would be, if he bothered to exert himself.
A word of advice, then, to the author: there’s a moment at the beginning of
The Thirty-Nine Steps [1935] when Richard Hannay/Robert Donat and the Woman of Mystery “Annabella Smith”/Lucie Mannheim come out of the theater to catch a streetcar, and a fat pedestrian [guess who] passes briefly between them and the camera — and then disappears from the narrative. Though he was doubtless as selfobsessed as any other film artist, Hitchcock did not proceed to make a series of movies about this fat pedestrian; a lesson which Mr. Smith might do well to absorb.
____________The waste land. (9/16/01)
