Clerks - DVD Review

MOVIE
VIDEO
AUDIO
EXTRAS
OVERALL

One Disc
1.85:1 widescreen
English Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Original Theatrical Trailer
Deleted Scenes
Commentary
Soul Asylum Music Video
Run Time: 92 Minutes
Keep Case

MOVIE
Rated R for language and (almost) NC-17 sex talk.

I came late to Clerks, missing it in the theater. Not a big deal. This is not one of those movies that was "meant to be seen" on the big screen. It does just fine on that six inch portable you have stashed in the back of the garage. It's even black and white, so that's a plus. Okay, so Clerks does look like a film school film. And I would know, I've been to film school. It's not only rough around the edges, it's rough the whole way through with frames still in the film from the end of the roll, burned by sunlight. I was going through a miserable phase in my life, working at Jewel as a bagger, struggling through high school, in a relationship drought. I would take handfuls of movies home from the library, ten, fifteen at a time, and watch all of them before they were due back in four days. Clerks was like a revelation, prompting me to be "mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" I quit my job at Jewel and was on my way to a better life. (Okay, so I went on to Dominick's, and then Blockbuster, and then a pet store and a kiosk at Woodfield Mall, but in there I also worked two desk customer service jobs and found a whole new world of mind numbing soul stealing jobs at my disposal.) And now I've lost my point. Clerks spoke to me. As I imagine it spoke to thousands of others across this great land of minimum wage jobs. It shows us that we're not the only ones that are sitting there, steadily going crazy behind a cash register, and one day we're just gonna go Travis Bickle and kill them all. Or maybe not, but we found a kindred spirit.
Clerks is the story of Dante Hicks (Brian O'Halloran) an employee of the Quick Stop convenience store. He is the terminally put upon employee, forced to come in on his day off after working an open to close the night before. And there's his buddy Randall (Jeff Anderson), a man who lives to do as little work as humanly possible at the next-door RST Video, that he routinely closes to come over and engage Dante in a pseudo intellectual debate about anything on his mind, but mostly Star Wars. These two unlikely heroes stay inside the store almost the entire film (mostly due to the fact that this was shot after hours in the dead of night) eat the food, hassle the customers, who they both feel they could do without and put up with the antics of two drug dealers standing right outside that won't go away, Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith).
You may have heard of those last two. They've proven so popular that they were the only characters that survived through the series of four films, and then got their own, finally allowing others to reprise their roles. (Although Brian O'Halloran played several cousins of Dante Hicks including Gil and Grant.) Jay and Silent Bob were never my favorites though, I could identify with Dante, the terminally put upon employee, although more whiney than I would've liked. And Clerks was brilliant because it was different. It did something I'd never seen before, take its time, and allow its characters to just sit around and talk about things. I'd seen a lot of movies at this point (my library habit was at its peak) but Clerks was something different. It'd be another year or so before I found both Pulp Fiction and the hyperreal dialogue king, Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. Kevin Smith wrote conversations that we'd had, though perhaps not so intellectually. He wasn't afraid to talk smutty and, lets face it, that's all the conversation you can muster after being stuck behind a register for nearly twenty four hours, sex talk is the only thing still interesting. Smith almost got an NC-17 for profanity, which would've been a first, so legend has it, they took the film back, didn't change a frame, and passed with an R. Sure, the acting isn't great, particularly with many of the customers who suffer from halting speech disease, something that also happens to our leads, but you somehow see past that. The film's ultra low budget, somewhere below $30,000, dictated that it be shot on black & white with sometimes poor equipment and, likely, one take. This is often credited as making it feel like a documentary. And I guess it does a little. I think, moreover, it feels like real life.

VIDEO QUALITY
What can be said about a 16mm film blown up to 35mm? Well, the blowup was done out of necessity for a theatrical release by Miramax, and Kevin Smith said: "Fine, sure, do whatever you want, release my movie, PLEASE!" The transfer was well done and we don't lose heads, but we probably see less counter tops and feet than we would otherwise. This is the 1.85:1 aspect ratio that the film was shown at in theaters, despite being shot at 1.66:1. In any case, the only problem with the blowup is the increased grain inherent with blowing up 16mm film, this doesn't take away from the movie, and the grain is so consistent that, like letterboxing, it’s basically forgotten about after the first few minutes. The contrast of the black and white image is pretty impressive, with black blacks and white whites, but I do have a gripe about the lack of an Anamorphic transfer. Maybe they figured that such a low budget film didn't need an Anamorphic transfer, even though everything is getting one these days.

AUDIO QUALITY
The dialogue is clean and belies fairly good (yet still low budget) sound recording, however, it's fairly apparent that some work was done on the film before its actual release, and the songs used in the film sound quite different than the rest, utilizing a wide sound while most of the scenes sound fairly mono.

EXTRAS
The extras, as with all Kevin Smith releases, shine. This release is identical to the laserdisc release in every respect, starting with the first of what would become a series of fantastic commentaries culminating with the less than thrilling Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back track. Recorded on the set of Mallrats, Smith and the gang are riding high on the roller coaster that would knock them back into low budget filmmaking and they're all a bit full of themselves. The commentary gives us Smith and O'Halloran (Anderson is notably absent after a feud with Smith) as well as many of the supplemental characters, behind the scenes figures and a drunk Jason Mewes who periodically comes up to say some silly comment. This is like hanging out, watching the movie with these guys, what a good commentary should most definitely be. Though not on par with either the amazingly wonderful Chasing Amy or Mallrats commentaries, this was a great way to kick it off.
Next we have deleted scenes, mostly longer or alternate takes of existing scenes including an awful downer ending where, after the store is closed up, Dante is shot and killed by a robber. This would've killed the movie, and it's a good thing Kevin Smith's advisors had him change it before the actual release. Some of the deleted scenes are good, but most of the theatrical versions of scenes work better.
The Soul Asylum video is cool because, as Kevin Smith commented, it's as close to a sequel to Clerks as he'll ever come. It features Dante and Randall closing the store to play hockey with the band on the roof. It's strange to see things, nearly identical to scenes from the film, in color for the first time. Something that would become commonplace to us by the time we got to Chasing Amy and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Then there is the original theatrical trailer, using the film's brilliant tag line: "Just because they serve you, doesn't mean they like you." Quite a nice extras package.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
Clerks was great, it came at a time when I needed it and I saw it before the other either more mature or more polished films in the Kevin Smith oeuvre. It is hard to go backwards, though, as I found when I showed some of my friends who'd loved Mallrats and Chasing Amy this one for the first time. If you're screening his films for the unwashed masses, show them this one first and work forward; otherwise, you're good. It's quality.