John & Janet Pierson, now Austinites, in a still from the new Chasing Amy Blu-ray
Kevin Smith is a very important figure in my film education. I was introduced to the indie movement of the 90's by VHS tapes of Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy that I got my hands on in high school. I missed Dogma in theaters, but snapped it up on video as soon as it was available. I found out about the existence of other favorite filmmakers (Linklater, Soderbergh, and Tarantino, among others) after him, but his work has yet to diminish for me.
Tarantino on Charlie Rose calling Amy one of his favorite films of that year.
For trivia and other film connections, I had to pick my best friend's brain and dig deep on the sites of the day that would load over dialup. The internet was a much less evolved place then, and DVD commentaries didn't yet exist. I remember a video store clerk trying to convince me that Kevin went to her high school in East Dallas and "was drawin' those stoner dudes in school an' shit." No one could get away with that in the age of the internet on cell phones. I didn't believe her because I knew better, but I played along because she seemed to so completely believe everything she was saying.
The man himself.
My first five DVDs included Clerks, Mallrats and Amy. I've owned all three on VHS and DVD twice each. The lost tapes got loaned out and never returned. Clerks and Mallrats were double dipped on DVD, and my original copy of Amy was stolen along with my Jay & Bob discs that I never replaced. In high school, I wrote short plays for stage and screen that shamelessly aped the Original Jersey Trilogy. I've never shown them to anyone, but I continue to mine those ape-plays for good components.
I saw Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back in college at a mall theater. Jersey Girl was my first Kevin Smith movie at a festival (South by Southwest). It's easy to defend Jersey Girl when the people telling you you're wrong for liking it never saw the movie and are going off of "what people say". My now-wife, then-fiancee and I went to see Clerks II with a friend and his wife. He loved it, and she...did not seem to enjoy it much at all. Zack and Miri was the first Smith film I saw at a press screening instead of with a real audience or on video.
I really lived the golden age of VHS, when it was cheaper and less of a hassle for my parents to rent a pile of movies to let me watch and only every so often go to the theater. Even though there were frequently Blockbuster boxes in the house, most of what my dad picked up were disposable action movies that I barely remembered a week later and my mom didn't usually pipe in with her own taste. The internet, as I mentioned above, was not even remotely as pervasive and encyclopedic as it is now. Siskel and Ebert/Ebert and Roeper came on at 3:30am. I didn't have the mountain of advantages a kid does now.
The short version of all that would have been the following: I'm always glad to watch anything with Kevin's name on it. These three movies are points on a map in Kevin's Askewniverse, and they're landmarks in my filmgoing life. That's why I shared generously before getting to what I thought of the new Blu-ray Askewniverse discs.
Cracking open the new Kevin Smith Collection of Blu-rays was a little intimidating and a little cathartic at first, and I haven't devoured them all the way through. In acting, sense memory is or isn't a big deal (depending on who you talk to), but in real life, it's integral to our emotional responses and personal history. It's why people buy sports jersey after sports jersey or set up little rituals for themselves each year like family meals. You want to re-live those moments that really make you feel vibrant and meaningful. This is why the masses avoid arthouse cinema, since they assume there's always some pain involved.
Opening up a video copy of Clerks or Amy flashes me back to manually adjusting the volume so that my mom wouldn't hear all the "dick" "fuck" "shit" "cock" and other words she hated hearing coming from my room (and still hates seeing me use in writing something viewed by members of the public). I recall all the times I defended Affleck to people who hadn't seen Amy but had seen Forces of Nature and Pearl Harbor.
These movies have helped define friendships and sparked so many conversations in my life that going through every last thing on them was a bit too much for me all in one gulp. I have watched all the new features on Clerks and Amy (no new stuff on J&SBSB), and it's all fantastic.
The Clerks disc includes all of the extras from the Clerks X DVD three-disc DVD on one Blu-ray, a new introduction by Kevin, and Oh, What a Lovely Tea Party: The Making of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Tea Party is mostly behind-the-scenes footage, but touches just about every major (and minor) cast member from what I consider Cannonball Run 3: Kickin' It Askew. The one thing missing for me was the booklet that came with Clerks X. These things don't usually matter to me, but I like the pieces written by Kevin and Scott Mosier, and the photos of the Sundance submission check and other things. If you simply must sell your Clerks X set, keep the book. The transfer is actually an improvement over the DVD, so the joke about "how is Clerks going to look better in 1080p?" is misguided to say the least. The previous discs suffer from lack of contrast that the Blu-ray has in spades. The most important thing is to make sure your monitor is calibrated for black & white picture with lots (and lots) of grain.
There are only two outfits that I've seen do unparalleled (except by each other) color 16mm to Blu-ray transfer: Criterion and Kino. Chasing Amy may not be a completely ideal transfer to HD (soft black levels), but honestly I can't be certain, because I've never seen it theatrically. It looked fine to me, but after that virtuoso Criterion Monsoon Wedding transfer, I wonder how much richer the color could get. The Amy disc, and frankly, the boxset itself, is worth it for the new extras alone.
Tracing Amy [1:21:15] is the feature-length, warts and all retrospective doc that any big fan of the film has been waiting for. Bits and pieces of stories that have been told before by Smith in Q&A's and appearances are fully fleshed-out here and in "Was It Something I Said?" [18:17], a back-and-forth between director Smith and star Joey Lauren Adams. Smith and Adams were together romantically during the lead-up and making of the film, and they are very candid about how that impacted the whole endeavor. I haven't listened to the new commentary in full just yet, but the opening 20 minutes are true to form for these guys, who are among the best when it comes to commentary recording. The 10 Years Later Q&A at the Arclight 10th Anniversary screening includes Smith, Jason Mewes, Affleck, Adams, Jason Lee, Scott Mosier, and Dwight Ewell. I particularly liked it thanks to the presence of Ewell, one of Amy's most memorable actors. I wish I could say I've seen him in more than one thing since Amy, because he's a truly present and powerful actor.
Amazon will have to come down on that $54 price tag for a ton of people to jump on this thing, but fans will gladly drop $18 per to get these. Amy and Clerks are $50 together separately, so the box is the way to go.