It's time to run it's time to run

 So it's probably also time to address the Kevin Smith issue. 

It's complicated, though - and not in the sexual sense, which is probably for the best. And, as usual, it all comes down to access, that perennial problem. 

Here, in Britain, the first time I was ever aware of Kevin Smith was when I got round to seeing Dogma. This must have been some time in 2000, and my brain pegs it as late 2000 because I'm convinced (and perhaps mistakenly) that I saw it on a screener videotape sent to the university newspaper at which I was working. More likely is that it had come in and been left around after being reviewed and I had snaffled it, as I was wont to do. 

Equally likely is that I rented it or bought the screener as a used tape from Blockbuster, because that was just how I rolled back then. (Actually joining Blockbuster? Pssh. Spending more than it would cost to join buying used tapes? Sure! Why not.) 

Dogma is a clever, sarcastic, and above all amazing film; so much comedy wrapped around the possibility of the end of existence in its' entirety. 

And to be honest, I didn't actually pay much attention to who the director was, because it wasn't really just 'A Kevin Smith Film' to me at that point. That's the thing; all the identifying features (type of humour, Jay and Silent Bob - who them? - featuring prominently, Affleck and Damon - who we'll come back to later - among other things) were alien to me. It was just a cool, funny movie with a lot of heart and a willingness to include a lot of random biblical concepts not because the plot needed them, but because the plot functioned well because of them instead of in spite of them. 

See Legion if you want to see the opposite of how that works. 

Now here's where it gets problematic; I distinctly recall seeing Chasing Amy on that fun staple of early filmmaking developmental love, late night BBC2 programming. (See also Strange Days, among others; the programmers at BBC2 in the late 1990s / early 2000s were great at bringing in films like that. Hell, they may still be, for all I know). 

Chasing Amy is problematic not because I can't exactly remember when I saw it (although I have it filed as After Dogma, so let's run with that) but because of the sexual politics of the piece; you could make an argument that it was, in theory, one of the first post-gender, post-sexuality pieces of the time, but I don't think you'd get altogether too far. Not that I cared, at the time, because it was Pretty People Doing Pretty Things, which included, of course, The Sex. Which was pretty much all I needed to look for in films at the time. 

And again, it didn't really impact upon me that it was a Kevin Smith film, because, to be honest, I wasn't paying that much attention. 

After this, we can basically fast-forward to 2003, when a friend - of the time, no longer, but let's not get into that whole bridges thing again, although I'm now really impressed at how easy it is to find old posts, but I'm getting distracted - brought over Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and alcohol. 

We've now moved on from the Video and BBC 2 days, folks, and into the wondrous land of DVD, albeit played on a Playstation 2. (Which, in a funny way, I kind of miss every now and then, having sold off most of the physical stuff from that time and just kept the memories.) 

I really, really liked Jay [...]. It appealed to my sense of humour at the time, as I was also on the path to getting into Family Guy, etc. I still think it's a pretty bravura piece of filmmaking, and would happily sit down and watch it again. 

But here's the somewhat fucked-up part; I only discovered Kevin Smith after seeing Jay and Silent Bob, in the sense that I'd been watching his films for that long and not actually caring who made them. I know; shallow, right? 

So after a while, I bought the Clerks X edition of... Well... Clerks, in, of all places, Dagenham. And watched it, and loved it, and, for no real reason, ignored all of the special features in the package. 

Now, Clerks has a wonderful story attached, which many other sources - Jon Pierson, Peter Biskind et al - tell much better than me, of the young, driven filmmaker who risked it all by putting $22,000 on credit cards to make the film, risking financial ruin if it didn't come off. And it is, like I said, a wonderful story (although it's not wonderfully inspiring for as many people as try this and end up, well, bankrupt) and it forms a key part of the issue I have with Kevin Smith; he's a master mythmaker. 

This is not a bad thing. Nor is it a criticism. 

So let's set out my stall. I love most of Kevin Smith's films. I've listened to a good many - although nowhere near all - of the SModcasts, and I've grown to love Jay and Silent Bob Get Old. I think he's an inspiration to several generations of filmmakers, that his films are well-made and his sense of humour is something I really admire. 

I also think that the mythmaking is out of control. 

The past few years have not been kind to Kevin Smith, really. There's the whole "too fat to fly" thing - and, speaking as a fat man, I dread the day that could ever happen to me - along with the problems surrounding Cop Out and the controversy - well, kind of controversy - about how Red State's distribution rights were sold. 

I will admit, because of these and other things, my love for Kevin Smith waned a little. Then I thought; you're being a jackass. You're judging him without knowing the facts, just basing it on what you've heard on the internet. You should look into things more. 

And I did. 

And, like I said, it felt like the mythmaking has overtaken the filmmaking. 

And all this stems from a comment from a friend of mine to the effect that "Yeah, Kevin Smith's really good at blaming it on other people." 

I thought - even with the bloom coming off the rose, the scales falling from my eyes, etc - that's a bit harsh, surely? 

Then I read Tough Sh*t, and, well, it really did feel like the friend in question was right. 

There's a chance that Southwest Airlines really were complete asses who treated him unfairly and caused him and his family a lot of woe. 

There's a chance that Bruce Willis was a complete and total bastard on the set of Cop Out, which caused the whole film to melt into the puddle that it became, in the end. I've seen Cop Out and it's... Well, I have this thing. I don't like to judge other people's work until I've done something similar, because you can't know how difficult something is until you've done it yourself, right? 

But Cop Out feels soulless in the worst sense of the word. And in Tough Sh*t - and in Q&A sessions, and on the Podcasts (if memory serves) - Smith eloquently but persistently lays all of this at Willis' door. 

And maybe it's true. 

(And maybe I'm starting too many sentences with And. My A Level English teachers would be so proud.) 

But how is it even remotely in Willis' interest for the film to be bad? Sure, many stars turn up for the paycheck and the free craft services. Many films are not good for many reasons. But if I'm Bruce Willis - and, more importantly, if I'm Bruce Willis and I don't want that whole Ocean's 12 fiasco again - I'd make sure to actually, I don't know, engage with the director and the film, rather than be the unconsciable, unworkable prick that Smith portrays him as. 

Yes, there are all sorts of power games like refusing to read dialogue, or refusing to do certain things, or such. If I had to guess, you do them because you want something - more money, more craft services, something - rather than to just torpedo a film that you're involved in because you can. 

If everything Smith says about Willis' behaviour in Cop Out is true, we're looking at the most self-destructive actor around. And it doesn't look like Looper had the same problems, now, did it? Although that's an unfair comparison, maybe. But to lay all the blame squarely at an actors' door belies a terminal lack of flexibility on his part, and maybe if I'm ever in the same situation, I'll be able to do things differently. 

Ha. Like that'd ever happen - but still, Tough Sh*t - for all its' merits - acts as somewhere between apologia and polemic about other people's problems. 

Red State is equally problematic. On the one hand, you have to - and I mean, have to - celebrate an attempt by a director to branch out from their previous, deeply established style in order to try something new and different and evolutionary. And, as a script, Red State really is something interesting, and anyone who's willing to take a stab at people like the Westboro Baptist Church has to be applauded. 

And there's some bravura filmmaking in there - Mark Kermode in particular singled out Michael Parks' sermon as a particularly interesting element - but the result felt, on watching, curiously flat, somehow. It's the weirdest thing; it felt - to this viewer, if to nobody else - that all the elements that made Kevin Smith films Kevin Smith films had been surgically excised when they could have been retained and tweaked. 

It's as if Eli Roth made a comedy and removed all the horror elements just in case someone made a comment about how it was so much like his previous films; it might not work. It'd be interesting, but it might not work. 

So here's how it works, because this is too long to keep going much longer; Kevin Smith was - and is, in some ways - a hero for me. But he's also a myth, and a self-made myth at that, which threatens to become PR of the worst sort. And, sadly, PR never ends well, because, at the end of the day, it's all spin.

Wow. That's kind of a downbeat, waffley ending for something I wanted to use to express both praise and concern (and, maybe, disappointment) in someone I'll never meet, speak to, or interact with, but who's had a giant impact on my life. 

That's because, as was said, It's Complicated. 

But overall I'm glad of the influence Smith has had on my life.