Clerks (1994)

In 1994, a 23-year-old Kevin Smith maxed out every credit card he could open to make a movie about two guys talking shit behind a convenience store counter for 92 minutes. Steve has been a stan ever since.

Clerks (1994) is Steve's pick, and he doesn't hide it. This was the movie that made teenage Steve start asking how movies actually get made. Nic, meanwhile, saw it once around '97, has only watched two other Kevin Smith joints in his entire life, and is essentially arriving as a tourist in the View Askewniverse. Two pretty different angles on the same black-and-white slacker artifact.

The dads work through Dante's worst day at the QuikStop, where the rolling steel doors are gummed up, the cigarettes are flying, and basically everyone in this New Jersey town wants to buy a pack at all times. They appreciate the resourcefulness it takes to make a movie for $27,575, from "I assure you we are open" shoe-polished onto a tarp, to a three-person rooftop hockey game shot to sound like ten. They also can't ignore the limits of that resourcefulness, especially when Veronica is wrestling with Smith's dialogue like it's been dipped in Crisco. Steve has thoughts on what a more experienced writer-director would have rewritten on the fly.

The Death Star contractor monologue gets full appreciation, mostly because the roofer who walks in to escalate it grounds the bit in something real. Olaf the metal singer gives us the phrase "making fuck" and earns a slow clap for ESL effort. Randall gets full credit for being the most committed kind of bad friend, and Caitlin Bree gets treated, as Nic puts it, fucking brutal for the crime of cheating on the worst guy in the world eight and a half times.

Hi, can I get some cigarettes? Just cigarettes.