Shot on a shoestring budget yet lacking neither creativity nor quality, Kevin Smith's feature film debut is an expertly crafted, smartly scripted, brilliantly directed, cleverly humoured & finely performed indie that's filled with genuinely funny moments, idiosyncratic characters & many wonderful homages to succeed as one of the finest comedies of the 1990s.

The story of Clerks is set at a convenience store in Leonardo, New Jersey and covers a day in the lives of two store clerks. First is Dante; a retail clerk who is called into work despite his day off. Second is Randal; a video store clerk who hates his job just as much as Dante. The plot follows the two & their acquaintances as they discuss movies, play hockey…

Film #42 of Project 90

”I'm stuck in this pit, working for less than slave wages. Working on my day off, the goddamn steel shutters are closed, I deal with every backward ass fuck on the planet. I smell like shoe polish. My ex-girlfriend is catatonic after fucking a dead guy. And my present girlfriend has sucked 36 dicks.”

It’s entirely in black & white, it is made with a budget of less than 30,000$, there are no superstars or even professional actors in the film, it is the debut film of its director, it happens in a convenience store and it doesn't even have a typical story. It can’t get simpler than this. Clerks is the ultimate mixture of creativity…

It really is a shame that Kevin Smith has become such an insufferable git in the last few years or so because I think he has dragged Clerks down with him in the eyes of many.

Being as this was the first time I've watched Clerks for several years, I did wonder if I would have soured to it having tired of Smith in general in the last few years or so, but I really haven't. It's not as fresh or as funny as it was when I saw it for the first time back in 1996 or 1997 and I can't see that it is one of those films that necessarily rewards extensive rewatching. It has still remained very…

"I'm not even supposed to be here today!"

And finally, I have come back to Clerks, the last of the three stylistically rich films that totally changed my perspective on movies during my Freshmen year of college. The others include Wes Anderson's 'The Royal Tenenbaums' and Guy Ritchie's 'Snatch'.

Clerks definitely falls into a category of movies I like to call intellectual banter, where the majority of the film just consists of people talking about their lives, relationships, and metaphorical situations. What makes Smith's contribution to the genre unique is that he occasionally punches things up with some over the top sexual humor, that we don't see coming. While this kind of crude humor is all over the place and…

This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers.

In some ways, I remember it like it was yesterday. I think it may have been a February night, actually. I would want to say I was 15 or so, and since that would have been before my birthday, it would have been 2015. It was a snowy night, I had acne, I was in one of my high school ruts that was this violent cycle of not being motivated to do work so I didn't do it, but then since I didn't do my work I would get bad grades and further feel unmotivated to do work. As a means to lift up my spirits, I went…

9.5/10

(As a note, I have not seen this recently but I wanted to give my thoughts on it anyway.)

Clerks, in its extremely nineties, extremely realistic humanism, the small interactions and trivial debates that make up our lives is one of my greatest influences as a writer. While pretentious at times (the titles of the vignettes scream student film) Clerks is an exercise in how people interact, especially in a minimum-wage, shitty kind of work environment, a environment that is all too common in the world now and was then. That commentary is what Clerks II fails to grasp, as it attempts to be more of your standard, edgy studio comedy. There is an almost punk kind of energy…