In which I list my favorite Kevin Smith movies

1. Mallrats.

(via)

I like Mallrats because it's just a funny movie with an oddball plot. Brodie and T.S. spend an entire day in a mall and later, an indoor flea market (or dirt mall, as T.S. calls it). In that time they help derail a knockoff of The Dating Game, get several people arrested, meet a fortune teller with a third nipple, and win back their girlfriends. Not bad for a day. The cameo by Stan Lee is nice, as is the comic book references. The running gag with Silent Bob constantly crashing through things while Joey Lauren Adam's character is trying on clothes in dressing rooms always gets me laughing.


2. Dogma.

(via)

I could have easily put Dogma at the top spot instead of Mallrats, so consider this a tie between the two. What's not to love about this movie? You have Chris Rock as a forgotten apostle, Alan Rickman as Metatron, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as fallen angels trying to destroy existence by creating a contradiction in the infallible Word of God. Also, Jay and Silent Bob are prophets, while Alanis Morissette is God. Fucking fantastic.

One of the things about Dogma that is so interesting is that at the time, Kevin Smith was a lapsed Catholic and beginning to question weighty things like religion and faith. You can see that in the movie with such things as the last scion (Linda Fiorentino) working at an abortion clinic and a woman playing God. I think Dogma is a heavier, deeper movie than the rest of Smith's movies, at least the ones I've seen.

3. Clerks.

(via)

I picked up the 10th anniversary edition of Clerks up 10 years ago, fittingly enough. It's a good movie that was funny, but not in the same way that Mallrats or Jay and Silent Bob were. The humor here was more absurd and in the case of what happens with Dante's ex-girlfriend, black. Speaking of Dante, the original ending to the movie where he's killed in an armed robbery is interesting, but I'm glad Kevin Smith didn't go with it. My favorite part though will always be Dante and Randall's debate about the culpability of the contractors working on the Second Death Star in Return of the Jedi and whether they deserved to die or not.

4-10. Everything else. It's not that I dislike the rest of Kevin Smith's movies, but simply because I like the above three more or haven't seen all of them, like Chasing Amy, which I want to.