Chris Bergeris-The first person to review Kevin Smith!...Aw damn someone already did it, oh well

So for this week's blog, focusing on directors, I chose to focus on Kevin Smith. Kevin Smith is sort of an insperation for independet movie makers. The guy goes to film school for like a year, gets a collaboration going, then comes back to his hometown and makes a film that cost about two hundred thousand dollars and just when he thinks he'll never be able to pay back the debt, his film gets into a film contest and makes it big. For me, Smith as a screenwriter/Director is the perfect combination. He's not one of those directors who doesn't even know what his script is about, he knows. He doesn't dwell in action, rather in dialouge. It's the characters that drive the plot, not the plot that drives the chracters. Sure, his humor is crude, and it's impossible to go a whole movie without a sex joke, but that's what people expect of him. I mean, after your first film has a scene where a girl admits to giving 37 blowjobs, really, where else can you go?

What lies beneath these jokes are the characters. For the most part, Clerks is the story of two friends who dream of doing something better but know (or some don't know) that it's almost never going to happen. Mallrats features a character who learns he has to grow up from being the comic collecting jerk to being a guy a girl really wants to be with. Chasing Amy features a character who has to try and overcome his love intrest's past in order to be with her. Dogma deals with a character trying to have faith when she already lost it. Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back...okay this movie is all jokes and the exception to the rule. But then Clerks II has the same characters from 12 years ago on the brink of a realization of what they've done with their lives and whether or not their friendship will survive. Smith doesn't hit these themes over the head, but he makes nods to them that they're easy to pick out. Another interesting thing with Smith is that he works with the same people on almost all of his movies. This allows his movies to have a certain feel to them. It also doesn't hurt that he has a team of actors that he can rely on to get the job done. It's also an interesting concept that his movies are all connected in some way or another.

Overall, Kevin Smith will never get the recognition he probably deserves. But he's one of the only guys in comedy (and no, Judd Apatow is not one of them) that can make you laugh and make you think at the same time.