Clerks (1994)
Directed by Kevin Smith
Convenience and video store clerks Dante and Randal are sharp-witted, potty-mouthed and bored out of their minds. So in between needling customers, the counter jockeys play hockey on the roof, visit a funeral home and deal with their love lives.
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6 films that influenced Clerks
What critics say influenced Clerks
With a boldness you'd never see in Dante, Smith followed the lead of Richard Linklater's homemade "Slacker" (1991) and patched together the $26,000 budget by selling his comic- book collection, maxing out his credit card cash advances and borrowing money from family.
Along with Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991), which was released three years earlier, Smith’s scrappy black-and-white ode to the fears and loathings of post-collegiate misfits in a New Jersey suburb is the definitive Gen-X movie, one that rejects virtually everything that classical Hollywood stood for aesthetically and narratively: no stars, no story, and certainly no artistry, at least as that word is conventionally understood.
They also talk of "Star Wars," one of the common touchstones of any film-nerdy conversation then and now.
Although Dante and Randal seem to think they’re just killing time until something better comes along, the knowledge that this bottom-rung wage-slave life is eventually going to swallow them whole lurks behind all the potty humor, Star Wars references, and unintentional necrophilia.
And somewhere in the midst of this, he manages to find time to discuss the tragic fate of the independent contractors working on the Death Star in the original “Star Wars” trilogy.
It's not John Cassavetes' Shadows (1959), but what Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994), lacks in subtlety it makes up for in laughs.
That didn’t exactly happen, but Smith’s little film, when combined with a handful of other independently produced efforts like Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape (1989), Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), and Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi (1992), helped to reshape the industry, proving that bigger is not necessarily better (which megaflops like 1995’s Waterworld and 1996’s Cutthroat Island amply proved a few years later).
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A parody needs to appreciate its source inspiration, and more importantly to understand it, and there's no obsessive love of Star Wars evident in Spaceballs the way there is in, say, Dante's rant about Luke Skywalker as a war criminal in Kevin Smith's Clerks.
Quentin Tarantino has become famous as a video store clerk who watched all the movies in his store, and then went out and directed " Reservoir Dogs " and " Pulp Fiction ."