Fingercuffs

Well, I finally have a few minutes to write and now, by God, I just can't think of anything worth writing about.

Um... I finally got to see No Country for Old Men this weekend. That's interesting, right? Right? No? Look, I'm sure sometime in the next month or so There Will Be Blood will come out on Starz and I'll be all caught up on the 2007 Oscar season movies and we can have what would have been a fantastic conversation about film and art and the direction of cinematic expression in an increasingly segmented, disjointed and visually overstimulated world 11 months ago. But for now, I'm doing what I can do. Me and the boys watched The Empire Strikes Back again tonight if you're interested in talking about that.

I guess my only point about No Country is that I should have taken away from it that Tommy Lee Jones, great as he is, is still grossly underappreciated and that dialogue in films, it turns out, is a tool of obvious hacks.

If you think about it, No Country is the exact antithesis of a Kevin Smith film. You know, the Clerks guy. Sorry, I guess that was a small film at the beginning of his career like 15 years ago. For current audiences, he was also the director of Clerks II. Hope that helps.

If you look at any of the Smith films, it's all talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk. He gets such raves for his dialogue, but honestly, it's horrendously overdone (I defy you to look over his entire oeuvre and find one quiet scene) so that it can't help but be stilted and unnatural. In the place of actual plots, he has conjunctions and transitional phrases and grating, shoe-horned segues to present ideas verbally instead of letting people show something physically or, God forbid, emotionally. He gets beat up for not moving the camera, but it's not that he won't, it's that he can't. There's nothing going on anywhere else except for that spot where that one person is speaking: making some kind of over-wrought point with a liberal sprinkling of "fucks," a shout-out to a comic book hero and no less than eleven (that's a mathematically derived minimum) references to anal and/or gay sex. I think it says something that even the guy named "Silent Bob" can't get through the end of one of those movies without chiming in.

It's frustrating for me because, as unimpressed as I've been with his films, I'm a huge Kevin Smith fan. It sounds strange to say because, what else does he have, right? If you look, you'll see him (not a fat joke, by the way, although, lawks...) on talk shows or on the internets, sitting with people, having great conversations, being smart, being witty, being funny and sharp and very happily profane in a charming, charming way. He's even been able to turn that ability into a cottage industry of books, websites and a video series where he just stands in front of people and talks. Couldn't be more down to earth or into the same retarded fanboy dork pop-culture that motivates me.

So I want to like Kevin Smith movies. When I saw them each individually, I found them to be perfectly entertaining in that kind of "Hey that was fun, let's see if the Jamba Juice is still open" kind of way.

In a way, I guess, his complete inability to develop as a filmmaker sort of embodies the stalled-out pre-emptive failure slacker aesthetic that animated--OK, totally wrong word--Clerks in the first place. The frustrating thing is that, seeing him out there on the interview and personal-appearance circuit, you know the guy has grown as a person (again, not a fat joke, but still, goodness me...) into a husband and father and business owner and general grown-up type. But while his hetero-life-mate Jason Mewes' struggle to overcome addictions to, well, everything is inspiring and makes for spellbinding personal storytelling, it's not enough to excuse Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

I guess what I'm saying is I saw No Country for Old Men and I immediately thought of Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I heard the premise, read the synopsis (synopsises? synopses? I don't know), even watched the red-band trailer and... well, I'm hopeful, but I'm not falling for it this time. I really want it to be good. And it looks good. 11 months from now when it's on Encore, I'll DVR it and we'll see. Until then, he's the guy who brought you Jersey Girl.

And when I do see it on Encore, I will be looking. It won't have to be long, just, like, 30 seconds tops, just one scene when someone just kind of sits there, with no song playing to tell us how we're supposed to feel, just an actor acting, moving, doing something instructive/constructive/related to both the plot and his/her implied inner life. 'Twould be a Kevin Smith first.

In the mean time, I may watch No Country again. Or OK, more likely, Hot Fuzz. But same idea.