Meewella | Critic

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Tag: James L. Venable

QuickView: Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009)

Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel quad poster

“Time travel. It’ll turn your brain into spaghetti if you let it. Best not to think about it.”

Ray

O’Dowd’s opening lines serve as a warning that this is a ride rather than engaging with time travel in any cerebral manner. Unabashedly inspired by Shaun of the Dead, the set up — three nerdy friends accidentally time travelling through the toilets at their local pub — could easily have been a rejected pitch for the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy. What FAQ About Time Travel doesn’t have is Edgar Wright’s creative cinematic flair, its visibly low budget lending the air of TV comedy. The script and characters are affable enough to entertain, though only O’Dowd and Faris are able to draw any substance from roles with little depth beyond the extent of their nerdiness. The result is is a sufficiently amusing Britcomedy that won’t answer your questions about time travel and lacks the inventiveness to elevate it above the constraints of its budget.

6/10

QuickView: Clerks III (2022)

“A sequel? What am I, a hack?”

Randal

Kevin Smith’s return to the Quick Stop in Clerks III is as self-indulgent as the abysmal Jay and Silent Bob Reboot but is considerably more successful, even if its comedy is inconsistent. Rejoining the eponymous clerks after 16 years, the theme is mortality as Randal suffers a heart attack and — whilst re-evaluating his life — decides to make a movie of his life that is essentially the original Clerks. The result lies at a cross-roads between nostalgic fan-service and a meta-textual examination of Smith’s own life. Opening with some full-colour recreations of key sequences from the original black-and-white Clerks, Smith explains during the credits that this reflects his memory of shooting the cult film 30 years ago. Meanwhile, Dante’s support for Randal’s film out of concern for his health mirrors Smith’s real-life touring podcast as a way to support Jason Mewes’ sobriety. Fans will recognise shooting stories brought to life, like Jay/Mewes’ shy refusal to dance in front of the crew. Whereas Randal was originally written as the person Smith wished to be — with open disdain for customers and not caring what others thought — his maturing perspective is more critical of the character. Filmmaking provides Randal with a productive way out of the arrested development in which we have seen him for 30 years whilst Dante remains fixated on the past, echoing competing aspects of Smith’s filmmaking over time. Clerks III’s humour may only land sporadically but it still manages to feel poignant, its last third committing to a more serious tone befitting the recognition of one’s mortality and the evaluation of Dante and Randal’s friendship. It would have been an interesting coda with which to draw a line under the View Askewniverse, but we know that a sequel to Mallrats is still under way. Instead Clerks III is another marker in a career that now spends more time looking backward than forward, in strange contrast to the film’s own message.

6/10

QuickView: Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot

“I used to think life was all about me. I was the hero of my own story, a Bruce Wayne of one lifelong issue of Detective Comics, so to speak. And then that kid came along and suddenly you realize you’re not Bruce Wayne anymore. You’re Thomas Wayne.”

Holden McNeil

A painfully unfunny opening scene in a location iconic to Smith fans is an inauspicious start to a reboot that provides a serviceable diversion with sporadic laughs. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was a self-indulgent movie that felt earned off the back of Kevin Smith’s run of successful cult comedies featuring the duo as recurring characters. This reboot is equally self-indulgent but follows a string of weak films that burned through much of the goodwill which might otherwise have carried this film. Instead Reboot finds diminishing returns in the same stunt casting and nostalgic references. This is a film about the shift in perspective that comes with fatherhood, both in a literal sense and (invariably for Smith) as meta-commentary, with his daughter playing a leading role (“I hate this guy. He forces his kid to be in everything he makes.”). Unfortunately, as has been plain since Jersey Girl, Smith struggles to combine that maturing perspective with his brand of comedy. Reboot earns some genuine laughs, largely from its biggest name stars like Damon, Affleck and Hemsworth, whose charismatic cameos sell actual jokes (almost a surprise for a modern comedy) about their celebrity. Fans of the View Askewniverse may find this fleeting enjoyment sufficient; if that sentence means nothing to you, you shouldn’t even be considering this film to begin with.

4/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

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