I just got done watching Clerks and was wondering what's everyone's favorite Kevin Smith movie?
This poll is only for movies Kevin Smith directed and are in the View Askewniverse.

Mine is easily Mallrats.

edit: had to redo poll, please vote again

Dogma was the most profound, Clerks was the funniest.

I like the one most people don't seem to like at all best, Chasing Amy.

BLACK RAGE!

I can see Jay and Silent Bob a thousand times and never get bored of it.

This thread should be a poll.

good idea...poll is up now

and for obvious reasons I didn't include Jersey Girl.

Fuck that. Jersey Girl is tied with Amy as my favorite.

I seriously hope you're joking...

but I just added it now anyways

ewww...Mallrats..really!? why oh why?

I agree with showstopper24, a poll would've been good for this.

When I think Kevin Smith I always think Clerks and whenever I come across it wherever I forget how well done it really is. I haven't seen Clerks 2 so I can't comment. Dogma was fantastic as well. Does Good Will Hunting count? He was co-exec.

Not joking at all. A fantastic performance from George Carlin + dead J Lo = gold.

there is a poll now...

Good Will Hunting doesn't really count. I'm basically just including all the movies he directed and are in the View Askewniverse.

And Mallrats is my fav!

Jersey Girl is LITERALLY the dumbest movie I've ever seen. Watching Ben Affleck try to act in that piece of crap is like having teeth pulled.

I voted for Dogma.


edit: How have TWOOOOO people voted for Jersey Girl??? You have no taste!

lol glad im not the only one

Dogma is my favorite...I like all of them though (yes, including Jersey Girl).

I don't know about "dumb" that might be a bit extreme but I was disappointed and I tried to love it but didn't happen.

Thanks for the poll OP. I had no idea you could add it after making the thread.

EDIT: ROGUE is edit-happy.


Chasing Amy is my favorite.

lol had to redo it, the poll reset when I edited my OP.

I think it's clerks, and it's not even close. Every movie he's made since clerks hasn't been as pure, hasn't been as funny. He's tried to evolve a bit, move beyond a bit, and fails, some times a small degree of failure, sometimes its jersey girl. His movies are still really funny, and I'll still probably keep seeing each new one. But I think clerks is still his masterpiece.

go watch clerks 2, it was very good

I think Kevin Smith is overated.

I agree with BigD, it's Clerks by a mile. Clerks is the original, it is very well-written, and I have to give him credit for getting the movie made for basically right around 30K or less. Mallrats is hilarious, and is probably my 2nd favorite, though the editing job is horrendous. Chasing Amy might be his best overall effort. Dogma has its moments. Jay and Silent Bob should be much funnier considering how many funny people were in it. Everything after Jay and Silent Bob is meh. Clerks will be the movie he is identified with and remembered for the most, because it was fresh and clever when it came out.

That right there is the issue. When I saw the original clerks, I had never seen a movie like it. It's writing and humor were hilarious, but it also was poingent. But all the movies smith has made have been increasingly stale, and like I've seen it and heard it all before from him. It's still funny.. but..

I think movies like Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob are overrated. Dogma seemed a bit over it's head, a little too.. lacking in subltety for the issues it was addressing. Plus like every five minutes, some character would give a monologue that wasn't funny, and didn't drive the plot, but only served to explain to the audience the religious theory, ideology, dogma, and I think these little monologues just ruined the movie and made it clunky. Jay and Silent Bob was high on shock value comedy and low on wit. And too many wacka wacka wacka cameo's that served no purpose. I liked clerks 2 better than either of these two movies, but still no where near as much as clerks.

for me

1. Jay and Silent Bob
1a. Mallrats
1b. Clerks

Dogma and Clerks

BTW, I enjoyed Jersey Girl

i liked clerks 2 better than the original. for some reason i did not like clerks. i barely laughed the entire time, but i do realize it was great for only being made with 26k

I may be the only person who thinks this, but as far as acting is concerned, the original Clerks was so bad it's almost painful. Yes, the writing is good. Whoopdee-doo. Writing doesn't mean anything if the actors you chose can't pull it off. It's not a difficult script to act. Just make it so it doesn't seem like you're reading it out of a text book in your 8th grade history class.


You want to call something a masterpiece based on the writing, make a literature forum. Movies are more than just the script.

1. Chasing Amy
2. Clerks 2
3. Mallrats
4. Jersey Girl
5. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
6. Dogma
7. Clerks

the movie cost 26 k to make, it was a completely and true indy film. what kind of actors did you think they were going to get for this movie? Smith as a visual director or as a director of acting is extremely limited. Like, say, the acting in dogma was wooden the whole way through. Smith's one strength as a filmmaker is his writing. Everything else about him as a filmmaker is mediocre to bad.


And that's still a fine avitar, CW.

I've seen this one. It's about a hooker named Amy who hitchikes around the country giving a different sexual favor to each trucker she meets, right?

I realize that, and I knew that this was going to be the response. I'm not saying he needed to hire A-listers for cameos and such, and I actually appreciate that he didn't. However, I think you could've found a bunch of college kids, paid them $50 a pop, and the end result would be a much more enjoyable film. Same script, same everything, just different people. Or maybe some reach arounds or something to motivate them a bit more.

Fair enough. I guess I just view movies from a director centric view, not from an actor centric view. There are few movies that I think the acting makes a difference in my enjoyment or lack of enjoyment of a movie, one way or another. The only one that comes off the top of my head is Kill Bill 2, but that's because caradine was too old to do any meaningful physical acting in the way of a sword fight. If Vin Diesel would have played bill, at least he could have wielded a sword. I think great writing/directing can transcend the actors in the film, and I think great acting can't save a bad script or a crappy director. But that's just me.

[*]Chasing Amy
[*]Clerks- The dialouge was better in 1
[*]Clerks 2
[*]Dogma _MattDamon_
[*]Mallrats
[*]Jersey Girl
[*]Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

Of course the acting in Clerks is bad....Kevin Smith had to shoot the movie at night with no budget, asking his friends to star in it, many of them in more than one role. It's not like he made the movie expecting it to become a cult sensation. Since Kevin Smith is only mediocre as a director, when asked to rate the best Kevin Smith movie, I have to base it on its writing first and foremost. On Clerks, he didn't even have $50 a pop to pay college kids; he had maxed out 3 credit cards and sold his comic book collection just to be able to fund what meager budget he could scrape up.

I wasn't really thinking about the question of "name the best acting performance(s) in any of Kevin Smith's movies". Besides as we all know, Linda Fiorentino's performance in Dogma is far worse than any acting job in Clerks or any other Kevin Smith movie for that matter. I haven't seen any movie that really shows me that Kevin Smith is a good director, but I agree with BigD, that his writing got a little more stale as the years past.....words can't explain how disappointed I was with Clerks 2, a sequel that didn't need to be made.

We can agree to disagree, CardWarfare....I suppose I just approach the question from a different angle. BigD, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head though.

agreed (with most of it)

agreed also. i didn't really like clerks, but i appreciate it for how Smith pulled it off

Only two votes for Mallrats? Man, I think it's definitely his funniest movie. Clerks and Strike Back aren't far behind though.

Mallrats is funny, but has a ton of problems mostly in editing. The original version contains jokes that were referring to a huge part of the movie that got cut in editing (the original opening) and a few other things along the way. This week I saw the extended full version with all the footage and some of the scenes flowed horribly and lost a ton of the comedic value along the way. When looking at Smith's movies I always lump Mallrats with Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, because they are both attempting to go for the same shock value humor as the other just with different budgets. Since I have a slight mancrush on Jason Lee, I give the edge to Mallrats.

Clerks and Clerks 2, are basically sitcoms that are in movie format. I don't see how you can like one and not the other... seriously if you didn't laugh at "37... in a row?" and "Try not to suck any dick on the way through the parking lot.... HEY YOU GET BACK HERE!!!" then you should never watch a Kevin Smith movie. Some people just can't fathom watching movies in B&W... oh well.

Dogma was my least favorite of his movies when I first saw it, until I watched it a few more times and the humor grew on me.

My list looks pretty close to this, just switch Clerks 2 and Mallrats around and omit Jersey Girl because I haven't seen it yet.

I really did like Clerks 2, but Clerks probably has the slight edge, and while 2 had more laughs probably, I think the original was just a newer, fresher movie, and really got it's point across. Though he did work in the moral in 2 pretty well at the end, but it didn't come off as natural.

I gotta go with...

1. Clerks
2. Clerks 2
3. Mallrats (Maybe it was when it came out, and that I may have seen it more than the others... but a lot of it is damn funny)

I look at the entire movie overall. I don't analyze writing and take into account the budget or the circumstances, I watch the goddamned movie and hope to be entertained. When there are glaring problems in either the writing, acting, or anything else, it affects the enjoyability of the movie, and therefore my perception of it. As far as Clerks is concerned, the acting made the movie far less enjoyable. I don't care who did it and how much they were paid. It could've been done better, even by the same people for the same money.

Aside from Affleck's performance (which I know I'm in the minority on), what is it about Jeresy Girl that makes it so unwatchable?

It's just hip to hate Jersey Girl. I thought it was a good movie.

either that or it was a banal romantic comedy.

Just saw him last week strolling out of the pokerroom at the river rock casino in richmond bc. Dogma was my favorite.

bump I just watched Chasing Amy.