TheRetroCritic

Every saga has a middle age and this is what happens when Jay and Silent Bob get old... The follow-up to Kevin Smith's classic low-budget cult classic Clerks may not have been greeted with an overwhelming amount of positive outcries since half of the View Askew fans weren't sure how Smith could possibly make another Clerks movie successfully. Were those fans proven wrong? Well... yes and no. Clerks II 's goal wasn't to imitate the first film or try to live up to it, instead, it wanted to continue these characters' story and expand their universe a little. Case and point: the film opens with the iconic Quick Stop burning down before the film transitions from black-and-white to colour thereby telling us from the offset that this isn't the same movie and that Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and Randall's (Jeff Anderson) lives are about to change radically. It's a really good scene and one of the strongest images in any Kevin Smith movie to date. Th

After Mallrats failed to impress at the box office, Kevin Smith and his View Askew universe enjoyed a little more success with Chasing Amy , a film following the doomed relationship between a jealous straight guy and a gay woman. The film opens on a lighter note with Ben Affleck's Holden, a comic book artist, living with his pal Banky (played by View Askew regular Jason Lee) and dying to get together with Joey Lauren Adams' Alyssa until he learns that she is not, in fact, into guys. Still hoping for something to eventually happen between them, Holden forms a friendship with Alyssa and the inevitable happens: his true feelings for her finally come out into the open. The film then goes in an unexpected direction and ultimately ends on a bittersweet note. For many, this is the best Kevin Smith film out there and it's easy to see why: it tackles a relationship you've never seen develop quite like that in a movie before and it dares to be somewhat more intense and seri

The spin-off to end all spin-offs, Jay and Silent Bob finally got their own film to play with after effortlessly stealing the show in pretty much every movie they were in and with the likes of Will Ferrell, Mark Hamill and an all-star View Askew cast supporting everyone's favourite stoners, this was set to be one truly goofy and entertaining little adventure. And, indeed, it was! After finding out that their name is being used in Hollywood without their permission and that people are bad-mouthing them online, Jay and Silent Bob set off on an epic road trip which will take them all the way from the almighty Quik Stop to L.A.. On the way, they meet colourful characters to say the least, including a hitch-hiking George Carlin, an orangutan, a dorky Sean William Scott, and hundreds of cameos, some of which a tad confusing with both Jason Lee and Ben Affleck playing dual roles. Oh, they also party with Scooby-Doo, Shaggy and the rest of the Mystery Machine gang, as you do.