Over the weekend, two highly anticipated films which will forever be relegated to the "Cult Classics" section of your local DVD store: Clerks II and Snakes on a Plane.

Let's start with the last first. Snakes on a Plane, as I hardly need to inform the internets, has been hyped to hell. I doubt if any other film has ever had so many superlatives lobbed at it, let alone before its unveiling. But it's here now. And on Sunday evening, several friends and I sat alone in a theater in Provo (which is likely the ideal viewing circumstance for this film).

It's apparent that Samuel L. Jackson really enjoys acting in movies. I'm glad of it, because he's damn good at it. And he made this one actually watchable. From his very first line to the very end, everything Jackson said was gold. However, it'd be wrong to call it a good movie. There were some campy laughs to be had (especially in the exposition, which is hypercliché), but there was a lot of action movie bullshit in between to drudge through. And there's a lot. I was actually surprised at the amount of carnage in this film. At times it felt more like a zombie gorefest than a campy thriller, at one point prompting one of my friends to jokingly remark "Quick, kill her, before she becomes a snake!"

Oh, and just in case you miss them, there are snakes on the plane.

Now, onto Clerks II.

I like Kevin Smith. He isn't the most visually inspiring director, but his dialogue is generally fantastic. The original Clerks film is among my favorite comedies, largely because, with its extremely limited budget, Smith was forced to play to his strengths - characters and dialogue. Clerks II is his best film in the twelve years since Clerks. Returning us to the world of Dante Hicks and Randall Graves provides us with the same sort of limited canvas he was working with in 1994.

Not to say the film doesn't have its missteps. The character of Dante's fiancée, Emma, is obviously not meant for him. Kevin Smith will not allow us to fail to catch onto this. Subtlety isn't Smith's strongest suit. From the moment she appears on the screen, she's obnoxious. Perhaps this is a more general gripe about film that I'm taking out on this movie, but I wish characters like these weren't simply used as pawns. Allow us to feel a degree of pain for Emma when the inevitable happens. Make us a little conflicted.

Overall, though, the film succeeds. If I were the sort who assigned film ratings, this would be a three-and-a-half out of four stars film. It delivers much of what made the first Clerks great: dialogue. Dialogue in which one character's perceptions of the world and directly challenged by those of another, in which we witness a clash of two realities fighting for a claim to normalcy. It's a recurring theme in Smith's films, and one that I love to see explored.

Also, the movie's funny as hell. No fart jokes, even.

And a word needs to be said about Rosario Dawson. Not only was she her acting spectacular, but she was incredibly sexy. Seriously.

Labels: babbling about films