Chasing Amy question in The Pop Culture Quiz

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It’s March 2005 and Kevin Smith is a tired man. As Uncut is ushered into an understated drawing room at London’s tastefully elegant Langham Hotel, the comic book-loving writer/director/raconteur/slacker icon is garbed in his infamous green and black Silent Bob overcoat and splayed out on a chaise longue, flat out asleep.

Smith tore up the international cinema scene with his breakthrough indie flick, Clerks, a fast-talking, eloquently profane low-budget masterpiece centering on the go-nowhere lives of two convenience store workers. Culled largely from Smith’s own New Jersey convenience store experiences, Clerks won the main prize at Sundance and was rapidly picked up by Harvey & Bob Weinstein’s Miramax. The Weinsteins parlayed Smith’s self-financed $26,800 black & white labour of love into a hugely profitable worldwide hit and swiftly installed Smith at the forefront of their trusted creative inner circle. “I came in right after Quentin’s Reservoir Dogs and before the release of Pulp Fiction. I’m very often – and rightly so – tied to that era, the Golden Age of Miramax, where they fucking exploded.”

Over the ensuing decade, Miramax’s fortunes have risen dramatically, netting them a total of 60 Oscar wins and ten blockbuster movies (from Pulp Fiction to Spy Kids) that have grossed over $100 million at the US box office. Throughout the same period, Smith has written and directed five modestly-budgeted movies under his View Askew imprint: two raucous gung-ho comedies steeped in the comic book-inflected mythos of his “View Askewniverse” (Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), one controversial religious fantasia (Dogma), one critically-lauded exploration of contemporary sexual politics (Chasing Amy, his best movie to date) and one almost universally-derided experiment in family-friendly comedy drama (2004’s Affleck clunker, Jersey Girl). All but the latter feature Smith and childhood pal Jason Mewes as drug-dealing fanboy icons Jay and Silent Bob.

In a bid to rival Robert Rodriguez as Miramax’s busiest multimedia-hyphenate, Smith has also found time to relaunch two major comic-book heroes (Daredevil for Marvel and Green Arrow for DC), maintain two award-winning websites (ViewAskew.com and MoviePoopShoot.com), film his ongoing series of Roadside Attractions shorts for Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, produce an infamously short-lived Clerks cartoon show for the ABC network and launch an outrageously successful career as a raconteur on the US college lecture circuit (spawning the never-less-than-100%-entertaining DVD ‘An Evening with Kevin Smith’).

The View Askew canon’s record-breaking performance on DVD has ensured that Smith, along with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, is one of the company assets that the Weinstein brothers are taking with them following their acrimonious split from Disney. Harvey and Bob have had to sacrifice their beloved Miramax company name (named after their parents, Miriam and Max) but managed to keep their Dimension Films imprint. Dimension plans to release 15 to 20 films per year and the first of these is Smith’s soon-to-be-filmed Clerks sequel, The Passion of the Clerks, a production that promises to play to his creative strengths after the misfire of Jersey Girl.

As Uncut thuds down in a chair opposite, Smith gingerly opens one eye. He’s clearly fucked after a marathon five-hour Q&A session (recorded at London’s Criterion Theatre for his soon-to-be-released An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder DVD), swiftly followed by a long day promoting his new book, Silent Bob Speaks (a must-read collection of Smith’s sardonic magazine columns – reviewed by Uncut this month, June 2005).

Nonetheless, Smith is a man who’s incapable of delivering a half-arsed anecdote and, mere seconds after his wearily amiable greeting, he’s sat bolt upright, issuing forth with evangelical New Jersey zeal on ten years of Miramax, his real opinion of Tarantino, the brilliance of Shaun of the Dead and the raw animal power of iconoclastic Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein.

You’re the man who extended Miramax’s independent portfolio beyond the pure art-house aesthetic. Who, besides Harvey and Bob Weinstein, deserves the credit for Miramax’s initial rise to power?

You gotta give it up to Steven Soderbergh for Sex, Lies and Videotape in ’89, man.

Sex, Lies was Harvey and Bob’s first multi-million dollar grosser – they did $25 million with that. It was an independent film that travelled well beyond the art house ghetto. After that, Tarantino is the one that blows Miramax off the fucking map. Miramax became The House That Quentin Built because Pulp Fiction made over 100 million bucks at the US box office alone - unheard of at that time for an independent flick.

Now that they’ve stormed out of Disney, is it easy to assess the scope of the Weinstein brothers’ contribution to moviemaking over the last fifteen years?

Without Harvey and Bob, independent film doesn’t get into the hands of the masses. Essentially, without them, it stays within the art house community. Harvey and Bob are responsible for taking indie flicks and bringing them to the suburbs. I grew up in the fucking backwoods of New Jersey and if I wanted to see movies like Prick Up Your Ears or My Own Private Idaho, I had to travel all the fucking way into New York to see them. Harvey and Bob completely changed the game, they took those movies to the fucking suburbs.

They gave the audience the benefit of the doubt, something that the major studios hadn’t done since the late 70’s, when they decided that all American audiences wanted to see were these big budget fucking popcorn movies. They fucking forgot that there was a whole period of fantastic, successful movies that weren’t instantly commercial or marketable, made by the young turks of the 70’s.

Harvey and Bob essentially reinvented that period and put independent movies back into the hands of the regular neighbourhood people who weren’t metropolitan sophisticates.

You reference Quentin Tarantino’s importance to Miramax. As a fellow Weinstein employee, what’s your take on QT?

Tarantino? Brilliant. Without him, I don’t have a fucking job. I saw Reservoir Dogs and I was like “Oh my god, you can reference The Thing [from Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four] in a movie? Ben Grimm? You can have a poster of The Silver Surfer hanging up? You can dissect a fucking song by Madonna?” So that opened up the door for me with Clerks.

Y’know, you sit there with Pulp Fiction going “Why can’t there be more movies like this?” and at the same time you’re so glad that there’s not more flicks like Pulp Fiction because you wouldn’t appreciate Quentin as much as you do. That movie was a total eye-opener, it’s like a masterclass in mixing tones. When I first saw it, I was like “Okay, you can make a movie where one moment it’s very funny and the next minute somebody’s getting their fucking head blown off.” He really is the progenitor, man – he’s the godfather of everything.

Is Tarantino a Jay and Silent Bob fan?

I saw Quentin on a US TV show when Chasing Amy came out. It was around the time that Jackie Brown was released and he was sitting in with a bunch of critics discussing movies of the year. Anyway [Time Magazine film critic] Richard Corliss asked Quentin what his favourite movie of the year was and he said: “Chasing Amy, because Kevin Smith took a quantum leap between that movie and his first two movies.” I mean, that meant everything to me - my fucking head almost exploded because I respect the guy so much.

A couple of years later, I saw him at the Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back premiere and he fucking loved the movie. I was like “You? You loved that movie?” But he really did. His only complaint was that he wasn’t in it. He said: “You made a fucking movie about Miramax and you didn’t put me in it?”

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back [Smith’s lunatic, self-reverential 2001 cartoon romp through the mythology of his previous four movies, full of returning characters, bad taste gags and celebrity cameos] was a real weird movie for me, ‘cause that was the one that – for some reason - seemed to gain me the credibility and respect of the dudes who’ve been doing this longer than I have. Robert Rodriguez fucking loved that movie. Richard Linklater was like “I really think that’s your best work, you’re on solid footing with this movie” and I’m like “That movie is my best work?”

Six movies into your film-making career, do you get debut fimmakers quoting Kevin Smith as an influence?

A while ago, Quentin called me up and said “I’m having a screening of this British movie Shaun of the Dead, have you seen it yet?” So I went over to Quentin’s and I fucking loved the movie. Last night, I was out in London with the dudes who made it, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg – excellent fucking guys. They were telling me about seeing Clerks for the first time and that watching Dante and Randall have the Star Wars conversation was a real eye opener for them. They were like “My god, you can really talk about stuff like this on film?” and when they put things together a few years later, that scene informed what they were doing with their TV show, Spaced.

Two of Hollywood’s highest profile leading men, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and an Uncut favourite, Jason Lee, all received their first break working for you, right?

I met Affleck and Lee through the Mallrats auditions – we set open auditions and they were the two dudes who came through. When we were shooting the flick, I just fell in love with them both. I met Matty Damon through Affleck and just kept using all three of them from then on. Affleck is like one of the funniest people you’ll ever meet - a tall, good looking, smart guy who’s really fucking witty. He’s really got everything. There isn’t much difference between Ben and Matt then and Ben and Matt now, except now they work more steadily and have a lot more fucking cash.
Of course, Affleck, right now, is getting the shit knocked out of him - but that seems to have run its course.

What makes you think that open season on Affleck is over?

I think that Truth, Justice and the American Way (Allen Coulter’s upcoming movie about the mystery surrounding typecast 50’s Superman actor George Reeves’ sudden death, starring Affleck as Reeves] is the movie that’ll put him back on top. It’s Ben Affleck, a guy whose career has been troubled over the last year, playing George Reeves, a guy who’s career had been troubled for many years prior to his death. It’s a perfect role for him, and he’s not the lead – the movie’s really about the guy investigating Reeves’ death [played by Adrien Brody], so Affleck doesn’t have to carry the whole fucking thing. It’s a perfect comeback vehicle and we know this because we have Pulp Fiction as the model - this is the Travolta role from Pulp Fiction.

Were you around when Miramax picked up the movie that kicked Affleck & Damon into the big leagues - Good Will Hunting?

Back when I was writing Chasing Amy for Affleck, he gave me the Good Will Hunting script and asked me to put it in front of Harvey. I read it in the bathroom. I was there for two hours and just read the whole fucking script - y’know, fucking weeping on the toilet, which I normally do when I look between my legs. I fucking loved the script and I called Harvey and said “Boss, I know this sounds stupid, but this script my friends wrote, it’s like the best thing I’ve ever read, it’s fucking breathtaking. Like it’s good, it’s Oscar good…. I think. But it comes with a huge turnaround cost. It’s currently with Castle Rock, who picked it up for $800 grand - it’ll probably cost you a million bucks”. Harvey tells me that he never pays that kind of money for a script, that’s really fucking high, but what the fuck, send it over anyway and he’ll read it over the weekend. First thing Monday, Harvey calls me back and starts booming: “I’m buying this, I fucking love it.” So that put us all in the Miramax family – Matt, Ben and me. I was already kind of there with Chasing Amy, but that lodged us firmly in there with Harvey and Bob.

You’ve often described Harvey Weinstein as a father figure and famously defended him when Peter Biskind trashed him in his 2004 book, Down and Dirty Pictures. On the eve of your fifth collaboration with The Passion of the Clerks, what’s your final word on the notorious Harvey Weinstein?

He’s a fantastic man, a great beast. From time to time, he asks me “Why do you call me a beast?” It’s got nothing to do with his size, it’s just that he’s this great beast that doesn’t exist anymore, who’s all commerce and passion at the same time. With the US studio system, you get people who are all about the commerce and very little about the passion. Harvey just can’t be one without the other. He’s always a businessman, always thinking about how he can turn a buck off stuff, but how he directs movies into the cinemas and how he figures out what he wants to change about them and how he gets behind certain movies - that’s all about genuine fucking passion. He’s like an old-time Hollywood studio boss.
It’s easy to take shots at contemporary Hollywood and say: “They don’t care about the art.” It’s easy ‘cause it’s fucking true – they really flat out don’t care about the art and they fucking didn’t until Harvey and Bob showed up.

So, he’s just your average misunderstood movie mogul?

He’s just this unique dude who’s a real creature of the ego and the id. He has this powerful fucking demeanour that’s a combination of regal and street. Like, when he bought Clerks, Harvey called us over to this restaurant at Sundance and he was sitting there, eating the greasiest fucking pile of potato skins and smoking a cigarette at the same time, going from one to the other bellowing “I fucking love this movie, I’m taking this fucking movie and we’ll put it in fucking multiplexes. We’re gonna put a fucking soundtrack on it and we’re gonna fucking blow it out”. We were like: “Fucking A, he talks like us.”
He really is a splendid, splendid man. Kind of like Henry the Eighth, or Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast, but coupled with that edge that Ben Kingsley has in Sexy Beast. He can be very fucking dangerous at times. Thankfully, it’s never been turned on me but I’ve seen it turned on and, shit, he’s a fucking frightening dude when he wants to be.

Interview by Andrew Sumner

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Cops and the president we’re suspicious of, but freaks and masked men in tights - them we trust

By Kevin Smith

Stan Lee, the Godfather of Marvel Comics, the human face of comic books for the last forty years, comicdom’s ambassador to the world, once told me that he’d thought superheroes would be just a fad. But with the first appearance of DC Comics’ Superman, and the red letter (or red-boots) sales that followed, Marvel did what any good marketplace competitor would do when the other guys have a good idea: They aped it. And thus began the decades-long proliferation of the tights set.
So what is it about superheroes that has captured our imaginations for more than half a century? Why is it that we view cops, the legal system - hell, even the presidency - with cynical suspicion, whereas we will still believe in what a man masked in a pointy-eared cowl or a barelegged woman in a tiara stands for?

I say it comes down to two things: altruism and the clothes.

The superhero archetype was the creation of an international coalition of the willing, years before it was en vogue to team up and knock the tar out of an evil menace. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, an American and a Canadian, dreamed up Superman back in the Thirties and established the palette from which all superheroes will be painted, till the end of time. Take a man or a woman with the power or abilities that could be used to enslave the world (or at least a small corner of it, such as Gotham), and have him or her opt instead to employ their might for right. Give him or her two identities - either to protect their loved ones, or simply to maintain some semblance of a normal life outside their work. Wrap them up in clothes worthy of the Halloween parade down Santa Monica Boulevard in L.A., and you’ve got a superhero.

Like Westerns, superhero tales are normally about fixing what’s broken. But the clothes are a lot better. In the real world, cops and firemen perform heroics daily - but they don’t have the great outfits. They’re missing the cape. They’re missing the tights. And where the hell’s the codpiece? That’s how you can tell a superhero, right? They’re all-powerful, they can do no wrong and, apparently, they are also hung like Holmes. When women are superheroes, it’s not the codpiece that’s stacked, it’s the bra. If Wonder Woman really existed, the magic lasso or the invisible jet wouldn’t be the most implausible aspect of her character; it’d be her ability to just stand up without falling over.
But maybe it’s that touch of the impossible that makes them so appealing. The first comic book I ever purchased featured an “imaginary” Superman story, in which Lois and Clark were married. The image from the tale of Mr. and Mrs. Superman that struck me the most was of Superman and Lois Lane waking up together on a bed of clouds. The implication was that they decided to join the mile-high club, but because I was a kid, I didn’t put two and two together, because I didn’t really know what sex was yet (my wife says I still don’t). But I did know that my parents slept together - however, it was on a double Sealy Posturepedic, not a cloud. What I took away from that comic was that superheroes do the same stuff that everybody else does. They just do it way bigger (and probably longer, in more positions and far more satisfyingly).

After nearly seven decades of predominance by comic-book superheroes, their audience is dwindling. Today, successful comic books move up to 150,000 copies; in the Fifties and Sixties, even the less popular titles sold in the millions. It’s been rumored that Warner Bros. keeps DC Comics going solely for the licensing fees that can be derived from their characters. How sad that comic books wouldn’t be published for the value of their story so much as for the financial margin derived from slapping a superhero’s face on a pair of socks or a Frisbee
Even though big business threatens to do what the Legion of Doom couldn’t, the superhero still thrives today, continuing to capture imaginations. But the new superhero icons aren’t born on the page anymore; they’re born on the screen, where special-effects technology has finally caught up with their uncanny abilities. The Wachowski brothers’ ultrabrilliant movie The Matrix not only gave the world “bullet time,” it invented the superhero in the best way possible: by not changing much at all. Neo is the very definition of a superhero. He’s got a secret identity (the guy in the rags he normally is when not inside the Matrix), he wants to save the world, and he’s got the clothes. But if that’s not enough to rank Neo up there with the legends, I submit this final proof: In the trailer for The Matrix Reloaded, the guy can fly now. How fast, you ask? Probably faster than a speeding bullet.

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by Mona Mansour
Quick quiz: What filmmaker has brought to the screen: a) two self-described “hetero life partners,” b) a sexual encounter with a dead man in a convenience store bathroom and c) Alanis Morissette as God, crouching down to smell flowers and celebrate Her handiwork?

The answer, of course, is New Jersey’s Kevin Smith. There is simply no other writer-director who can attest to the originality of Smith’s vision.

Smith burst onto the scene with 1994’s “Clerks,” a black-and-white film shot after hours at his then place of employment. His portrayal of two guys working dead-end jobs in a convenience store–and the freaky friends and patrons they encounter on an average day–struck a chord with audiences and critics, picking up awards at Sundance and Cannes.

Smith followed his auspicious debut with “Mallrats” (1995), “Chasing Amy” (1997), “Dogma” (1999) and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” (2001). His recent projects include the upcoming fall feature “Jersey Girl,” starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, and “Fletch Won,” which is in preproduction.

Throughout his career, Smith has managed to convey an unmistakable point of view, with characters discussing everything from whether cookie stands are indeed part of the food court to whether Lois Lane’s uterus is capable of carrying Superman’s child. It’s quite fitting that the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival will present “Freedom in the Arts: An Evening with Kevin Smith” on Saturday, as part of its HBO programming.

“Comedy can be a sharp form of social comment and criticism,” festival founder and executive director Stu Smiley says. “Our Freedom of Speech programming acknowledges artists who have used their art and craft to speak out on social issues. In comedy, the freedom of speech really means the freedom to create satire or lampoon institutions, without fear of censorship. Much of comedy, at its best, is social satire.”

Smith’s social satire is perhaps most evident in “Dogma,” in which two banished angels from heaven rush to a New Jersey church where they’ll be given a second chance to re-enter heaven.

In the film, a “disgruntled” apostle, played by Chris Rock, offers his take on religion: “People only want to hear the good shit–life eternal, a place in God’s heaven–but as soon as you hear that you’re getting all this good shit from a black Jesus, you freak. And that, my friends, is called hypocrisy. A black man can steal your stereo, but he can’t be your savior.”

Smith’s frankness has, of course, earned him his share of controversy. “Dogma” was dropped by Miramax (and sold to Lions Gate) after its parent company, Buena Vista, received flak from religious groups who claimed the film was anti-Catholic.

When asked if today’s political climate puts freedom of speech at even greater risk, Smiley responds: “Freedom of speech is always in danger of being chipped away when a country faces uncertain times. Although, I don’t think there has been an institutional diminishment of liberties. I think it’s fair to say the current climate has made people more aware of what they say and how they say it.”

But even for Smith, there are limits to what he will put in his films: “You’ll never hear my characters talk about how they like Variety better than The Hollywood Reporter,” he says.

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When I was a kid, much to my chagrin, my grandmother watched The Young and the Restless every afternoon. This was a problem for me, as the campy, live-action Batman – my prepubescent raison d’etre – aired at the same bat-time on a different bat-channel. And, try as I might, I could never boo-hoo my Grams into switching stations.

The older I got, the more fervently I’d rail against her soap – no so much in an effort to get her to spin the dial to Batman but more to convince her on a critical level how insipid the show was. And Grams, God bless her, would always simply shrug, smile at me knowingly, and go back to enjoying the adventures of Nicky and Victor. Sure, I might’ve had a point in all my caviling, but she liked what she liked, and no amount of belly-aching was going to make her turn her back on what she called “her stories.”

This summer, Episode II: Attack of the Clones was met with a more churlish response from the critical community (both off and online) than Richard Gere’s plea to an audience full of New York cops and fireman for peace and cultural understanding at the Concert for NYC 9/11 benefit. With the exception of Time’s Richard Corliss, most critics sharpened their lightsabres and carved poor George Lucas a new one, as if he were a Taun-Taun and they were trying to save a Wampa-ravaged Luke from the freezing winds of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. To use a less-fanboyish analogy, the Powers That Be beat the shit out of Episode II like the movie had fu**ed with their girl- or boyfriends behind their backs.

What were the all expecting that had them feeling so let down? I’ll allow that in terms of predictability, Episode II (and Episode I) make Titanic seem like a veritable whodunit. We all know the Empire’s going to rise and eventually fall at the hands of Indiana Jones, the dude from Corvette Summer, the chick who wrote Postcards from The Edge, and an army of teddy bears. We all know that the Jedi will be hunted to extinction, with the exception of Alex Guiness. We all know that Yoda lives through the Clone Wars and matures into a Muppet. There’s little-to-no mystery left in the Star Wars prequels, with the exception of seeing exactly how the space-shit winds up hitting the space-fan. And that should be enough to get even the causal fan into the theater.

Taken on those terms, I was enthusiastically not disappointed by Attack of the Clones. Shit, I loved it. Why?

Because I love a car wreck.

That’s what the new Star Wars flicks are to me: stunning, tragic car wrecks. And I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense, like this round of flicks is “sterile” as so many critics seem to feel. You can throw a rock and hit a happy naysayer happy to pontificate about how Lucas has lost his humanity, citing the last two installments of the Star Wars saga as guilty of being more digitally manipulated than a free-spirited eighth-grad girl’s breasts by her over-sexed boyfriend. But I’m not one of those cats. I’m digging the new installments for what they’ve become: the tragedie du Darth – the slow fall of Anakin Skywalker into the greasy clutches of the Sith.

And that little melodrama has never been more on display than in Clones. Here, we’re presented with the adolescent Anakin – the boy who’ll later torture his own daughter (unwittingly, to be fair) and cut his other kid’s hand off (rather wittingly). From the get-go, Lucas captures my limited imagination with one simple proposition. Darth Vader was once a teenager. How pedestrian, yet how profound! Evil’s gotta start somewhere, right? Why not show why Johnny can’t read - or in this case, can’t play well with others, and insists on using the Force to choke underlings who don’t live up to his expectations? From the hit-or-miss origin of Phantom Menace’s take on baby Anakin as the galactic Hitler in short pants, Clones ups the ante by presenting us with the heart of darkness right where everyone’s always known it lies: in the passions of a volatile high schooler.

Right off the bat, Anakin is portrayed as a kid who thinks he knows more than he does, and insists on proving to everybody that he’s as good as them, if not better. I went to high school with his guy. Granted, he didn’t grow up to carbon-freeze anybody (in truth, I believe he works at a Shell station now), but had he been given a lightsaber and taught how to pull the Jedi Mind Trick on folks, he might’ve.

In Clones, Anakin is a twelfth grader with a license and parents who want him home by eight: he’s a disaster waiting to happen. Who else but a tortured teen leaps out of a sky-speeder to capture a bounty hunter who’s talked smack about his girl (or, in the case of Clones, set loose killer centipedes in her bedroom)? With little-to-no concern for his own well-being, based largely on his assumption that he’s immortal (that worst of teenage attributes), young Skywalker forces Zam Wessel’s craft (how sad is it that I’m 31 and I know the name of a character who’s never really identified and appears only fleetingly in the film?) to crash-land in a densely populated city, and then pursues her (it) into a bar only to watch his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, make the final collar. And how does the Force-ful whelp wrap it all up with the wide-eyed cantina bystanders? He tosses them a condescending “This is Jedi business.” The balls on this kid!

Fatherless, this rebel without a cause (or Imperial without a cause, technically) is shown to trust in the quietly power-mad Palpatine – the Dad he never had, who fills his head with notions such as “I see you becoming the greatest of all the Jedi.” I knew guys in high school whose fathers would fill their heads full of this kind of bullshit, too, along the lines of “If someone gives you lip, you kick their ass.” It’s easy enough to take an impressionable youngster and turn him into a school bully, but the relationship of the would-be Emperor and his protégé is even more perverse, considering this is a kid who can telekinetically spin fruit in mid-air and Mind Trick a rampaging intergalactic rhino into playing Trigger to his Roy Rogers. Beating up freshman for looking at you is funny in the hallways is one thing; destroying a planet because you’re looking for the stolen Death Star plans is something else.

And never mind the whacked-out paternal issues. Anakin’s relationship with his mother makes Oedipus’s seem healthy by comparison. And like the lunchroom loudmouth who makes one mother joke too many, the Tusken Raiders reap what they sow when Anakin unleashes hell on a whole tribe of them for battering Shmi. What teenage boy wouldn’t slaughter the men, women and baby Sand People if he found his mother dead in one of their huts? That’s the origin of Darth Vader right there: the guy who went ape-shit when he lost his mom. Never mind that he’d been too busy galaxy-trotting for nine years to even so much as send her a Hallmark on Midi-chlorian-Mother’s Day: that’s his mom they fucked with, and they’re all going to pay. There’s something bittersweet about the fall of Darth Vader now, that hadn’t existed before Clones: had his mother simply died of old age, the guy might never have developed that extreme case of asthma he seems to suffer from in Star Wars, Empire, and Return of the Jedi.

Which leads to the most haunting moment of Clones for me: when Anakin breaks down to his puppy love, Amidala, and confesses that he butchered that no-good bunch of sand-eating bandage wearers with his hi-tech Zippo. This scene really resonated with me, because Amidala wears this expression that very quietly says “Holy Christ I’m in love with a human time-bomb.” The sad, hopeless look on her face upon learning of his murder spree brought to mind that moment in Jedi when Luke asked Leia if she remembered what her (and his) mother was like. Leia (in what may be Carrie Fisher’s finest hour in the original trilogy) reminisced that her mother always seemed sad. Here, nearly 20 years later, we get to see what Leia was talking about.

And that’s what worked best for me about the Anakin arc in Clones: the doomed love affair of Anakin and Amidala. Most of the critics dismissed this as the flick’s most ham-fistedly handled aspect, but I thought it played out tragically and beautifully. High marks to both Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, because I completely bought their relationship. He wants her desperately without really even knowing why, as do all teenage boys when they find who they assume is their one-true in high school. And even though she knows this guy is poison, she can’t help but fall for him - the little slave-boy that grew up to be a conflicted, impetuous hat tank who insists everyone’s giving him a raw deal. In high school, the really hot chicks always went for the massive ****-ups, and eventually wound up married to them. But this marriage doesn’t end in small town affairs and divorce; this marriage ends with the girl scattering her kids across the galaxy to save them from their father, who by that point is more machine than man.

The only thing that could’ve made Clones more enjoyable for me would’ve been if I was actually in it. (C’mon, Obi-George – isn’t there room in the next and final Star Wars flick for a portly Storm Trooper who smokes too much?) And as I sat there watching this beautiful fucking car wreck, fully aware of the attacks Attack was suffering at the hands of the critical Empire outside that darkened theater, I finally knew how my Grams felt when I’d slam The Young and the Restless. Now I’m the one offering up the knowing smile – because I love that Lucas is still dicking around in a galaxy far, far away, and I never want it to end. The Star Wars saga is my soaps, and no amount of bi-otching disguised as film dissertation is going to get me to turn my back on “my stories.”

Unless, of course, there’s a new Batman flick out at the same time.

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