CLERKS
A film review by Jules N. Binoculas
Copyright 1994 Jules N. Binoculas
Ever plan for a day off from a low-paying, dead-end job--and get a call to come to work for half-a-day--and end up staying all day, to be hassled by a steady stream of local weirdos--all because you just can't say no to anyone?
Ever wish you could stop complaining, but can't find the time--because you're back-logged with your old complaints?
Ever be so bored that you ask your girlfriend about her past sex-life and find out she's given oral performances on more organs than you could count in a suburban shopping mall?
Ever have a friend take over for an hour and end up costing you more than you make in a month?
Ever imagine Estragon and Vladimir--from Samuel Beckett's existential play, WAITING FOR GODOT--living in New Jersey, doing penance with perverts, wasteoids, and involuntary necrophiles?
If so, punch your clock, and spend an entertainingly annoying day with Dante Hicks: convenience-store operative, sans elegance. Help him out--his producer-writer-director could use the business!
After KEVIN SMITH, an East-coast-twenty-something-retail-factotum, saw the low-budget film, SLACKER--he decided to immortalize his own phlegmatic lifestyle on 16mm film. Why? That's all he could afford! And why not? It beats working for a living!
CLERKS starts off on a gray morning--like a pillow filled with rocks--and takes its time before strange dream-like sequences and eccentric losers begin to define themselves and amuse us.
Once we're fully awakened, we realize that all the unusual suspects have been rounded up--and aren't going anywhere in particular. By then it's about time to go home.
Spending a few hours watching other people work is serious business.
Like CLERKS' anti-heroes--we laugh, we're horrified, bored, can't wait to leave, but end up having a little fun--wondering if we'll be summoned for a sequel.
What the film lacks in polish, it delivers with enthused, rough-and-ready charm. Most scenes look like they were photographed through the bottom of a soda bottle (painted black-and-white). The actors seem like people you'd meet on a bus--on the way to a speech pathology lab. Since the budget precluded fancy locations, the audience is given an uncensored, not-so-guided metaphysical tour of sometime-collegiate male psyches. The humor is partially-effective, diarrhetically snappy, mostly-misogynistic, pseudo-educated schtick. Imagine Groucho and Chico Marx with a hormone imbalance--before they got rich.
Yet, for all its solipsitic frivolity, the film delivers a poignant philosophical message: you would be what you pretend you could be, if only you could gather the courage to pretend you should be something you're not. And if not, there's always tomorrow--if you don't have plans.
RATING: 88/100
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