You know, I harbor no particular ill will towards Smith. I don't delight in tearing him down. In fact, it's only a recent development that he's become someone I actively wish to see fail and leave the film business. Back in the day, I was something of a fan of his. I even lost a job in 9th grade because I left work for an hour to attend some of a screening of CLERKS. With each new movie he made in The Aughts though, I began to get the sense he was treading water. While I never saw Jersey Girl, CLERKS 2 was the first film of his I remember disliking with any kind of intensity. It felt like the worst kind of wheel spinning on his part. By the time ZACK AND MIRI rolled around? I was annoyed. I like Elisabeth Banks and Mr Rogen, and I feel like the basic concept of the film was sound. Instead, in Smith's hands, it was a jumbled mess of porn "star" cameos and unfunny gross out gags. Ugh. Even the memory of that movie makes me feel queasy, and I feel badly for Ms Banks that her star was tarnished by her participation
I feel like Smith has had more than his fair share of chances to grow as a film maker. I feel like he's proven himself to be incompetent, and yet he still gets work when other hungry young talent is still left to wander the wilderness. If I harbor any resentments for the man these days, that is what they are based in. I didn't see COP OUT, but I didn't need to see it to know it wasn't for me
This RED STATE TRAILER? There's hardly anything to discuss. It's slightly amateurish in it's sound design and appears to be just a bunch of shots cut together for no reason other than they don't look like normal Kevin Smith shots. They're not particularly scary. They're not that atmospheric. They look bland. The only standard by which they impress is the already low bar of Smith's work. There is no story, just some pretentious mumbo jumbo about god laid over unrelated shots of stuff from the film of cars clipping people, or people screaming in cages, ETC. Others have said it before but it bears repeating: if this wasn't a Smith movie, would any of us spend a single second of our lives posting about it? It looks like DT DVD level stuff, aside from the presence of Pop Racer and former POTUS John Goodman. I have no good will left for him, and no faith that RED STATE will turn out OK. I mean, it would be neat to be wrong about that, but I don't really see that happening
PS You may notice that up till this point, I have not addressed Smith's increasingly obnoxious public persona in this post. In an ideal world, his off screen antics should not color my appreciation of his work. Unfortunately he has become such a loud mouth in recent years that that is becoming nearly impossible. For someone who once watched his college lecture movie in 10th grade and cracked up till my sides hurt during the SM story, his fall from 'funny' has been startling
