USA: AMERICAN FILM PREMIERE OF KEVIN SMITH COMEDY MOVIE "JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK"

Record ID: 391793

  • Title: USA: AMERICAN FILM PREMIERE OF KEVIN SMITH COMEDY MOVIE "JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK"
  • Date: 30th June 2001
  • Summary: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (JUNE 30, 2001) (REUTERS) SCU (SOUNDBITE) (ENGLISH) KEVIN SMITH SAYING " This is a very big Valentine to the people that put us where we are, the people who buy the tickets, the people who kind of got us to the point where somebody would give us a bunch of money to make such a self-indulgent movie as this." SCU (SOUNDBITE) (ENGLISH) SHANNON ELIZABETH SAYING " He's so laid back himself and he really goes in with this mentality that a monkey can direct, he's like, I don't know why they let me do it but I do it and I'm just having a good time and he always tells us we're thinking too much and putting too much into it. He's like, just go do it! Just have fun! So, it's really laid back in that sense and he's open for anything and he'll make anything work and he'll tell you that from the beginning."
  • Embargoed: 15th July 2001 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES AND VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
  • Country: USA
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA75DIKJ60VHPD24L45QD1HXTV0
  • Story Text: With his "Dogma" controversy behind him, filmmaker Kevin Smith sets his sights on less theological and more scatological material in his latest comedy "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back." He attended the film's World Premiere on Wednesday, August 15 in Los Angeles.
    Kevin Smith's venerable supporting characters, Jay and Silent Bob (played, respectively, by Jason Mewes and Smith), get their own starring vehicle with the curiously titled ``Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back."
    Like the other films in Smith's unofficial series of ``New Jersey Chronicles,'' ``Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back'' is set in a continuous universe, with the characters and settings from ``Clerks,'' ``Mallrats,'' ``Chasing Amy'' and ``Dogma'' roaming in and out of the action to a greater extent than Smith has allowed before.
    The movie opens with our titular heroes as infants, parked in their carriages outside of a New Jersey convenience store, which is subsequently revealed to be the Quik Mart location from ``Clerks,'' where the characters were first introduced almost a decade ago. Back in the present, the duo is informed by their pal Brodie (Jason Lee, reprising his ``Mallrats'' character) that their comic book alter egos, Bluntman and Chronic, are about to be the subject of a big-budget Hollywood action movie.
    After verifying this with ``Bluntman'' co-creator Holden (Ben Affleck, in his ``Chasing Amy'' role) and reading some hurtful gossip on a movie Web site (called Movie Poop Shoot, but designed to look exactly like Ain't It Cool News), they set off on a cross-country hitchhike to California, where they plan to sabotage the production or, at least, get in on the action.
    With this set-up in place, pic turns from narrative to slapdash sketch comedy and broad parodies of big Hollywood movies: Jay and Silent Bob receive instruction in ``The Book of the Road'' from fellow hitcher George Carlin, before ill-advisedly trying out their newfound expertise on nun Carrie Fisher (one of a string of ``Star Wars'' references); they get picked up in the Mystery Machine by the characters from ``Scooby Doo'' (a parody of a movie that hasn't even come out yet); and they find themselves the unwitting pawns of a quartet of jewel thief femmes fatales (Shannon Elizabeth, Eliza Dushku, Ali Larter and Jennifer Schwalbach).
    Since ``Clerks,'' Smith's films have been fitted with raw, taboo-bursting dialogue and a sneakily subversive wit that deconstructed a number of Hollywood genres. But this time out, Smith has targeted something -- movie franchises and the studios that produce them -- that is already highly self-parodical. The result is the first Smith movie that wears its subversiveness on its sleeve.
    The chaos hightens when Jay and Bob are turned loose inside ``Miramax Studios'' (actually the CBS Radford lot in North Hollywood, where the movie-within-the-movie from ``Scream 3'' was also set), and their odyssey transforms into a phantasmagorical orgy of masturbatory Miramax in-jokes and contract-player cameos.
    Wes Craven and Gus Van Sant appear, busily directing fictitious sequels to ``Scream'' and the Smith-produced ``Good Will Hunting,'' while Matt Damon and the ``real'' Ben Affleck kid each other about Affleck's appearances in such ``bad'' Miramax productions as ``Reindeer Games'' and ``Phantoms.'' Miramax has produced most of Smith's post-``Clerks'' features, including this one.
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