Posted by SecondSuitor at 12.107.167.130 on January 15, 2002 at 17:28:40:
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY...(And NOT about HEROIN)
Most movie wiseacres perform. Jason Mewes exists, and that's his unruly glory. When he first showed up in ''Clerks,'' his lips pursed, his long blond hair shaved at the sides, he looked like nothing so much as the meanest New Jersey girl you'd ever laid eyes on. He was the dilapidated, vaguely threatening skate punk who spent junior high standing between the side-hall doors, then did the same thing in high school, then graduated to the parking lot. Mewes, however, was the least slack slacker who ever lived. From the outset, he talked a ticker-tape of obscenity, his dialogue a lusty rap of pure adolescent hormones.
In the celebrated cult role of Jay, Mewes is one half of the cheerfully blasphemous revue team known as Jay and Silent Bob, who have had a role in every Kevin Smith film, from the no-budget ''Clerks'' to the comparatively deluxe Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. But the teamwork has always been fairly perfunctory. Silent Bob, as embodied by the portly, bearded, coolly anti-cool Smith himself, is basically a mute guy who just stands there, making the occasional hipster hand gesture. Jay, by contrast, is a human cherry bomb, the most detonatingly funny in a long line of idiot-savant anti-achievers (Wayne and Garth, Bill and Ted, Beavis and Butt-head, etc.).
Imagine Dana Carvey's Garth stoked with the street nihilism of Eminem and the raunch of Al Goldstein, and you'll have a fair description of Mewes, the cinema's original suburban hip-hop id. He's a performer at once so larkish and so mysterious that the pivotal joke of his presence -- funny because it just might be true -- is that in a world of spotlight- sucking wannabes, he's a deadbeat pretending to be an actor so that he can hoodwink the audience by parading his irrepressible self.