Over the past twenty-four hours, Kevin Smith has done the equivalent of strapping a giant bullseye on his chest, while taking a massive sloppy shit on the very people who made him who is today.
Starting last night and continuing today Smith has hit Twitter to voice his discontent about the bad reviews his film “Cop Out” received, seemingly only reading his reviews now, for a film that came out a month ago. CHUD began compiling the tweets while Movieline has assembled them into a readable format below. We’ll let Smith take over from here:
Sometimes, it’s important to turn off the chatter. Film fandom’s become a nasty bloodsport where cartoonishly rooting for failure gets the hit count up on the ol’ brand-new blog. And if a schmuck like me pays you some attention, score! MORE EYES, MEANS MORE ADVERT $. But when you pull your eye away from the microscope, you can see that shit you’re studying so closely is, in reality, tiny as fuck. You wanna enjoy movies again? Stop reading about them & just go to the movies. It’s improved film/movie appreciation immensely for me. Seriously: so many critics lined-up to pull a sad & embarrassing train on #CopOut like it was JenniferJasonLeigh in LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN. Watching them beat the shit out of it was sad.
Like, it’s called Cop Out; that sound like a very ambitious title to you? You REALLY wanna shit in the mouth of a flick that so OBVIOUSLY strived for nothing more than laughs. Was it called “Schindler’s Cop Out”? Writing a nasty review for Cop Out is akin to bullying a retarded kid who was getting a couple chuckles from the normies by singing AFTERNOON DELIGHT. Suddenly, bully-dudes are doing the bad impression of him, using the “retart” voice. The crowd shifts uncomfortably. And you may impress a couple of low IQ-ers who’re like “Yeah, man! Way to destroy that singing retart!” But, really? All you’ve done is make fun of something that wasn’t doing you any harm and wanted only to give some cats a some fun laughs. #YesIcomparedMyFlickToARetardedKid
It was just ridiculous to watch. That was it for me. Realized whole system’s upside down: so we let a bunch of people see it for free & they shit all over it? Meanwhile, people who’d REALLY like to see the flick for free are made to pay? Bullshit: from now on, any flick I’m ever involved with, I conduct critics screenings thusly: you wanna see it early to review it? Fine: pay like you would if you saw it next week. Like, why am I giving an arbitrary 500 people power over what I do at all, let alone for free? Next flick, I’d rather pick 500 randoms from Twitter feed & let THEM see it for free in advance, then post THEIR opinions, good AND bad. Same difference. Why’s their opinion more valid? It’s a backwards system. People are free to talk shit about ANY of my flicks, so long as they paid to see it. Fuck this AnimalFarm bullshit.
Yeesh. We’re not sure where to begin with this, the long and short of it is that without those same critics who championed Smith’s films, he would still be making films funded by credit cards in New Jersey. Those “arbitrary 500 people” helped prevent “Clerks” from ending up like any number of low-budget Sundance films that never get picked up, never get distribution or even find life on DVD. More importantly, critics give Smith the kind of early career clout many aspiring filmmakers could only dream of: directing from their own scripts with minimal studio interference.
The fact is that as Smith’s career has gone on, he’s begun to run out of things to say and his style has simply grown stale. But worse, surrounded by fanboy love, has never been able to own up to his own misfires. When “Zack & Miri Make A Porno” tanked, he called out his longtime benefactors The Weinstein Company, for not doing enough to promote the film. Now, inexplicably a month after “Cop Out” was released, Smith is taking aim at critics for saying bad things about his movie (not to mention that using “Cop Out” as your first line of defense is probably not the best idea). Smith seems to want to have it both ways: he wants to strike a post that he makes meaningless movies and pretend they are nothing more than just “entertainment,” but doesn’t want to be called out if the film fails on even that level.
Smith opened this up by saying “Sometimes, it’s important to turn off the chatter”; this coming from the guy who tweets everytime he gets up to take a piss and jerk off to a picture on the internet. The first thing Smith needs to do is turn off the Google Alerts set to his own name and films, and stop reading his own reviews. Next, he needs to take a hard honest look in the mirror and try to remember who it was that took “Clerks” from a film nobody knew about to a film that became one of the must-see markers of ’90s indie film movement.
This is the part where we usually round up what a director has next on his plate, but if Smith doesn’t want our help, than we’re not gonna go out of our way to give it to him.