Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
***
Cinema
Releases - November 30, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. 104
minutes. Written and directed by Kevin Smith. Starring Jason Mewes, Kevin
Smith, Shannon Elizabeth, Eliza Dushku, Jason Lee, Ben
Affleck.
You have to have seen "Clerks", "Mallrats", "Chasing
Amy", "Dogma", and "Good Will Hunting" to get even half the jokes of
"Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back". To get a few more, it helps
to be familiar with the release schedule of Miramax Films and to have followed
every piece of pop culture for the last twenty-five years.
This is the last gasp of ironic cinema. It was
exciting when "Pulp Fiction" came out and has become a cliché in the
years since. "Jay and Silent Bob" makes it go out with a bang -- the movie
is packed to breaking point with slacker humour, bizarre slapstick and in-jokes
that double-back on in-jokes of in-jokes.
The movies of writer-director Kevin Smith exist
in and depend on pop culture so much that a 104-minute stream of in-jokes
makes perfect sense, and is good enough. "Jay and Silent Bob" will be
unwatchably, indecipherably dated in five years' time, but at the moment
its references ring true. Half of them are to Smith's own movies -- his
characters live in the same little world, circling the same hangouts and
popping in and out of each other's stories. But because we like this world,
and the characters plug away at the jokes so enthusiastically, this film
brings a smile to the face.
Smith himself plays Silent Bob, Jason Mewes plays
Jay, and together, of course, they have spent their lives standing on a New
Jersey street corner and selling weed. The plot of "Jay and Silent Bob Strike
Back" begins as they find out a movie is being made about them and they're
not being paid for the rights -- so they embark on a road trip to Hollywood
with the intention of halting the production.
Along the way they get in a rather embarrassing
situation with a nun, another one with a chimp, and another one with the
sexiest jewel thieves known to man (any movie featuring Shannon Elizabeth,
Eliza Dushku and Ali Larter is pretty much guaranteed three stars right away).
Bob does a lot of being silent, Jay talks about "beer" and "bitches", and
there's some smart dialogue too, as when one of the leads from "Chasing Amy"
explains the concept of the internet: "It's a worldwide communications network
linking millions of computers together, so that people from all over the
world can bitch about movies and share porn with one another."
There is a hard core of obnoxious Kevin Smith
fans who will like this movie no matter what it's like, so in a way it's
review-proof. For everyone else, here's the litmus test: If you don't know
the snowball speech or the phrase "Kiss my gritz!", then don't see this movie.
If you haven't a clue what I could be getting at, you shouldn't even be reading
this review.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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