51 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
51 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
capsule : the running gag pair of characters from all of kevin smith's films gets their own movie .
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the gags are sporadically funny .
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it is more than occasionally funny for teens who are fond of scatological humor and anti-gay jokes .
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the plot is weak and the leads are not a particularly funny comic team .
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the little inside jokes and digs at other entertainment and particularly at kevin smith films are the best features of the film .
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sadly for me they were just not funny enough to make the film worth watching .
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this feels like the high school skit that that the principal would not let the kids do on talent night .
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( and it turns out he had very good reasons . )
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, low 0 ( -4 to +4 )
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a film needs a plot .
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it needs characters for empathy value .
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it needs a story and an emotional center .
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if a film is just a chain of jokes it can only be so good and any entertainment value will succeed or fail based on how funny the jokes are .
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kevin smith has now made two satisfying films , clerks and chasing amy .
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with dogma he tried to make a philosophical religious comedy and mixed with a madcap romp .
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peter cook and dudley moore did that very successfully with their bedazzled .
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but getting the combination to work is very hard to do right and kevin smith's fecal monsters in dogma were not the way to do it .
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his remaining two films , mallrats and his new jay and silent bob strike back are aimed squarely at a teenage audience .
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jay and silent bob strike back is a compendium of gay jokes , penis jokes , flatulence jokes , film pastiches , and in-jokes .
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how funny the jokes are will be a subjective call .
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for me , the vast majority of the jokes were just not very funny .
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there was not enough cleverness or variety .
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it is funny at most once or twice to accuse someone of being gay .
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penis jokes work only so many times .
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showing up as minor characters in every kevin smith film jay and silent bob were a clever pair of human running gags .
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they were sort of the modern equivalents of naunton wayne and basil radford , the comic duo who showed up satirizing the english middle class in several good british post-war films including dead of night , the lady vanishes , and passport to pimlico .
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jay and silent bob were originally supposedly typical generation x stoners .
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as the series wore on they had larger and larger parts .
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in jay and silent bob strike back they are the leads .
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jay and silent bob ( played by jason mewes and kevin smith ) are chased away from the front of the convenience store where they were dealing drugs in clerks .
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this leaves them at loose ends .
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they are not sure what would be worthwhile to do with their lives when they hear that a comic book with characters visually modeled on them will be adapted into a movie .
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they decide to devote their lives to wrecking the movie or getting some of that big movie industry cash .
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so it is off to hollywood to shake down the movie company and having adventures along the way .
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the film is mostly about their adventures on the road and when they get to hollywood
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the problem with this comedy team is that neither really pulls his weight to make the film funny .
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silent bob , being silent , can only contribute to the comedy by reacting with that very expressive face of his .
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this makes his piece of the comedy even less than a straight man like a dean martin or bud abbott would have .
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jay has to be the comic .
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he could carry the load for both if he were extremely inventive .
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the problem is that he is not sufficiently funny .
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he is too bland to be the comic half and his lines just do not show any comic flair .
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so jay and silent bob are a long way from being a successful comic team .
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their starring roles and the low humor make this a comedy for those young at mind and for people who can laugh at gags they have seen before--sometimes just minutes before .
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like dogma before it , but definitely not like chasing amy , this film feels more like an amateurish skit than a real movie .
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certainly neither the plot nor the characters are at all involving .
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they are excuses for gags , many of which still fall flat .
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it is dogma without any of the humorous theological content .
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the film does not offer much to an adult audience .
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i rate it 4 on the 0 to 10 scale and a low 0 on the -4 to +4 scale .
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