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38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thirty-Seven?, 30 Jun 2005
By A Customer
Made in 1994 for $27,000 on Kevin Smith's credit cards, shot almost entirely at night in the store where he was working, oddball friends roped in for every job on both sides of the camera, and possibly the funniest script ever written specifically for 18-25s makes Clerks one of the greatest achievements in indie filmmaking.We see a day in the life of downtrodden slacker Dante (Brian O'Halloran) who gets called into work in his convenience store in Anywheresville, New Jersey at dawn on his day off. What follows is the weirdest day in the history of low-end retail. No spoilers, but Dante is harassed both physically and mentally by his boss, his boss's wife, customers, friends, colleagues, sales reps, corpses, lovers, ex-lovers, ex-lovers of his ex-lovers and the two local drug dealers. He lurches back and forth between earth-shattering revelations and bizarre crises until someone from the past turns up and he makes his worst decision yet. The earlier events of the day are as nothing compared to what fate has in "store".. Many of the sublime setups revolve around his best friend Randall (a seminal performance by Jeff Anderson) a video store operative who makes Dante look like a Lexus Dealer, and who is the source of Dante's chagrin on more than one occasion. The film also introduces Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes, Smith's muse, and Smith himself) as the local substance wholesalers with wisdom beyond compare when Jay is not abusing the local community. The script has just as many quotable lines as Withnail and I - grotesque, cringeworthy, profane in the extreme and very, very funny. Kevin Smith would never reach the same heights again, getting closest with Dogma, although all his films are watchable. Clerks does not appear on TV very often in the UK, and has not been available on R2 DVD before, so if you've only seen his more common recent work this film will put it those films in context. See how Jay and Silent Bob started out, and see all the characters that are referenced in "Mallrats", "Chasing Amy", "Dogma", and "Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back". Just remember - NEVER walk into your local video shop and try and rent 'Happy Scrappy Hero Pup'...
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