Clerks (pronounced Clarks) is an old American film that had been lost in the archives for decades. The story goes that when written it was so rude that no distributer dared release it. Fast forward 50 years and we find young American slacker Kelvin Smith who works as a cleaner in movie studios. He accidentally fell into one of the cabinets which contains all Hollywood’s movie reels which revealed a secret hole in the wall. Looking inside Smith found the long lost Clerks movie and stole it. After watching it he realised he could become a fat millionaire if he released it- it was the nineties and this was just the sort of comedy that people flocked to see. Being an amateur filmmaker himself he spliced in a couple of scenes starring himself and adding a couple of his favourite songs to the track. Taking his movie to Caines (the Southern French town owned by Michael who runs a yearly film festival there) he hoped his movie would be successful. Low down and behold, he was right! Clerks kick started a new wave of funnies, where people talked about their favourite movies and comics with toilet metaphors and sexy treats thrown in.
Clerks (pronounced Clirks) is about 2 friends who work in a shop in Kansas. One works in a Video shop, the other in a greengrocers, but both just sit about bored all day and make fun of the customers as they have a higher intellect. Observe the following exchange: Customer: Excuse me, can I buy this milk? Randy (sighs and tuts): Uh! You f*cking idiot! Of course you CAN buy this milk as long as you have tree fiddy. You should be asking MAY I buy this milk. You are an imbecile. Customer: F*ck you! Randy: Oh… wow! You must have a Shakespearean grasp of the English language and a huge brain to have thought up such a witty and well developed response. (Customer walks away) Randy: Yeah! Yo Momma!
Between customers they climb onto the top of the shop and play an American version of the English game Chess, known as Roof Hockey. Occasionally they argue about their favourite films: Randy: Which did you like better- Police Acad3my 3 or Police Academy 4? Dainty: 3. Randy: You blaspheme! Dainty: Nein! 3 Was when Zedd finally joined the good guys, he screamed at the door and made it fall down, all the other recruits were training again to further their policing skills, and Mauser was much better than Harris. Randy: Idiotte! 4 had tones of great new recruits, hot air balloons, yumma yumma yumma yumma YUM-MA! And Tony Hawk. All 3 had was a bunch of Muppets.
So goes their lives. The film is a series of loosely connected skits either dialogue or slapstick based, all revolving around brown jokes. My main problem is that the film is too American. I didn’t really get most of the obscure movie references and a lot of the words used are foreign to me. A lot of the time I don’t understand the accent and it is made worse by the fact that it is black and white. The film therefore is clearly very old and out of touch with today’s language and society. I did enjoy a couple of parts, like when the wench goes into the traps and Spacs up an oul chump, getting a mouth gift in the wrong place. Broxn!
Best Scene: When the popular comedy duo Joe and Salient Burt are dancing outside; that one scene explained more to me about America in the 1940s than any text book ever
did.
The Spac Hole 
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