“I’m Jay and this is my hetero life mate, Silent Bob.”
If that quote doesn’t sound familiar, then you need to stop reading this article and immediately find the movie “Clerks.” Or “Mallrats.” Or “Clerks II.” Or “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” or really any movie that Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes got their hands on. That or type in Jay and Silent Bob into your Google search engine. You get the point.
We say this because on November 21 the “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot Roadshow” is hitting up Durango’s Community Concert Hall. That’s right. The beloved New Jersey stoners are back.
This time, the iconic cheeba-lovers are making their way to Hollywood to stop a reboot of a film based on them and directed by, you guessed it, Kevin Smith. Joining them this time around is Milly, Jay’s (surprise) daughter. Millie is played by Smith’s own daughter, Harley Quinn Smith.
The idea for the reboot came after Director Kevin Smith, aka Silent Bob, nearly died of a heart attack in February 2018. After he was told he had an 80 percent chance of dying, as Smith laid on the operating table, all he could think about was that the last movie he made was “Yoga Hosers,” he told the New Jersey newspaper the Asbury Park Press in October. It was his only regret. It wasn’t a film he felt represented him or the rest of his work well. He decided if he got another shot at life he was bringing back Jay and Silent Bob.
“The idea is you watch this flick and you’re like, ‘Oh, well I know exactly who the director was. Boy, he’s in every frame of the movie. When he’s not Silent Bob he’s playing himself. It’s kind of gross. But clearly he was a big fan of himself and loved all of his friends and his interconnected movies and New Jersey,’” Smith said. “It’s a real testimony to who I was and I get to make the testimony. As opposed to somebody else giving me flowers after I’m gone, I gave myself flowers.”
Full Circle Cinema writer Katie Gilstrap compared the reboot to Smith’s and Mewes’ previous work, but it exceeded expectations.
“It is filled with youth, diversity, and is just enough to make you pay for “Strike Back” all over again. But this movie is “Strike Back” better,” Gilstrap wrote. “Call it a generational difference if you’d like. Maybe watching a film 18 years later is not the best, especially with differences in the way humor is taken nowadays. Smith made the transition from 2001 movie to 2019 movie effortlessly.”
And from what it sounds like, fans can expect a bit more emotion this time around, especially in scenes between Mewes and Harley Quinn.
“Making people laugh with Jay and Silent Bob, that’s the standard, you have to do that going in, and I’m happy to do that,” Smith told the Asbury Park Press. “After a quarter of a century, Jason and I know how to mine laughs out of Jay and Silent Bob.
“But this time around, the exciting thing was mining emotions out of Jay and Silent Bob that weren’t just glee and giddiness. Like, (we were) going for what the kids call ‘the feels.’”
For more information on the show, visit durangoconcerts.com.
Amanda Push
