I have not yet Kevin Smith’s new film Tusk (a horror movie about Justin Long being turned in to a walrus), but I’ve heard absolutely not a single good thing about it. I’m not forming any opinion on it myself, but I’m not surprised given that we were getting ready to party like Prince told us to the last time I enjoyed one of his movies.
Tusk may or may not be good, and it’s certainly not burning up the box office, but it’s doing well enough to get one of Smith’s passion projects off the ground. Thanks to Tusk, Clerks III has its funding.
Smith explains in his podcast, humblebragging and attempting to shame his “haters” –
“A year and change ago, I was desperately trying to get Clerks III made for the 20th anniversary, and that desperation — I must have reeked of it because I couldn’t fucking find money and shit. But it was Tusk, people going, ‘Holy shit, what else do you have?’ and I was like Clerks III and they’re like ‘Done.’ So, everybody that’s like, ‘He failed, he failed,’ I’m like ‘Thank you, I failed into doing Clerks III.'”
Did you catch that? In what might be the best example of accidental honesty ever, he summed up his career better than anyone else ever could hope to.
“I failed into doing Clerks III.”
Man, remember how much you loved Clerks? How much fun Mallrats was? The emotional weight of Chasing Amy? How Dogma was uneven but had some interesting ideas? Remember how he couldn’t break away from those characters or that world for years and by the time he really tried to he spent so long not learning how to become a better writer or director that a chart of the quality of his films for the last 15 years looks like a sliding board?
The fact that Kevin Smith is so stalled as a filmmaker that 20 years on, he’s, in his own words, reeking of desperation to revisit the characters that made his name in the first place says something. It says he failed into doing Clerks III.
