Posted: 08/25/2001

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

by Hank Yuloff

Either the most repulsive or the most intimate review you’ll read here all year.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

“Don’t take your dick out in front of a chick unless she says yes. Or until she’s asleep.”

“He loves the dick.”

If you have just made it through the first few lines of my review, you can make it through the first two fuck-filled minutes of the new movie by director Kevin Smith: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the funniest movie to come out since American Pie.

We open by finding out that Jay (Jason Mewes) and his generally pantomiming friend, Silent Bob (played by Smith) have known each other since toddlerhood. Most of their conversations revolve around pot, chicks, comic books and how much Jay needs to get laid. Several years ago, they became the basis for a comic book called Bluntman and Chronic, which has enjoyed enormous success among the slackerly inclined. The plot revolves around Jay and Silent Bob trying to stop a movie being made about their comic book characters if they are not going to get paid for it.

Part road picture, part slapstick, it isn’t necessarily the story, it’s how the guys get through the story that’s funny.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is the most commercial movie of the several in which Smith’s stoner-turned-comic-book- hero characters appear (Dogma, Chasing Amy, Mallrats, Clerks) and it’s just as funny. You don’t have to have seen the other ones, but if you do go back and check them out afterwards, see this one again and you will get a lot of great references. I will not mention any because it will totally pimp the humor, but… send me an e-mail afterwards and we can talk about our favorite lines.

They’re helped along the way by lots of people who stepped into cameo roles. Again, I don’t want to pimp it except to say if you’ve seen other Kevin Smith films, you will see a few of the same folk… including one black guy who is the funniest motherfucker around.

Make no mistake, though, you are going to have to fit into one of the following categories to like J&SB:

• You love the good parts of Saturday Night Live, not the crappy skits that have no ending.
• You love (or hated with a passion) any Wes Craven movies.
• You love (or hated with a passion) American Pie, The Fugitive, Dawson’s Creek, Animal House.
• If you are gay and can laugh at yourself.
• If you are black and can laugh at yourself.
• If you are a feminist and can laugh at yourself.
• If you are a guy and can laugh at yourself and recognize your shortcomings onscreen.
• You relish each and every one of George Carlin’s seven dirty words you cannot use on television.
• You think the word “Fuck”, in all its glorious and possible incarnations, is the most useful word devised.

• You work in The Industry and can laugh at how vapid and ego feeding most of it is.
• Or how most of the people in The Industry who feel they have talent are in actuality some of the most uselessly self-important boobs ever to inhabit the planet.
• You worked for some little movie company and understand that you aren’t really making classic entertainment, you’re making shit and hoping enough of it sticks for you to make it big in foreign video distribution.
• You have won an Oscar and can still laugh at yourself and see the silliness of it all.
• You work as the Production Supervisor on a movie that talks about having sex with non-virgins.
• You work for a Web-based movie web site and realize that most of what you write will only be read by your editor and the friends you force-feed your opinions to via e-mail. [Editor’s Note: Speak for yourself, jackass.]
• You are a successful writer/director who is willing to poke fun at himself by having his characters argue how they ever got talked into being in Dogma.

There are several scenes where it looks like they edited the film a fraction of a second before the actor cracked up. I can not wait for the DVD with all the extra footage (that’s a hint, Mr. Smith). If I had to be at all negative, one downside would be to question why Jason Lee showed up in one of the first scenes as comic book store proprietor Brodie Bruce while talking about his other character in the movie, Banky Edwards. But I’ll leave that for a face-to-face with Smith so he can embarrass me in private without doing it here, in front of all of you (As if that’s ever going to happen). The second negative is the lack of gratuitous nudity. Hey, Kevin: You had Shannon Elizabeth, Ali Larter, Eliza Dushku and Jennifer Schwalbach on the set and you couldn’t get one of them to take anything off? Dude!!?!!! Is there no justice for all?

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back gets my strongest recommendation. You don’t get them that often from me, so get your fucking ass into the theaters.

Hank Yuloff is an advertising guy in Los Angeles who has absolutely no illusions about his sexuality. The only dick he likes is his own.

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