Why are you so similar to Haley Joel Osment? Dammit.
I loved Clerks and Mallrats when I was in high school, which makes thinking about Kevin Smith now particularly uncomfortable, like thinking about a bad ex-girlfriend. “How did I once love this person?” one asks, and the answer casts unsettling aspersions on the very notion of a self. It’s possible I’m overthinking this. My point is that Kevin Smith once seemed awesome and is now—for that reason and also because he made this and, Jesus, this—embarrassing. He is proof that anyone with enough gumption and perseverance can rise from obscurity to become a Hollywood hack, and that the things we love occasionally turn out to be, in retrospect, pretty awful—not that they remain wholly without merit. Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but he’s really fat now.