Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith. Plain and simple. That's the only title I can give this post. You'll see why.

When the current poll expires tomorrow, I'm replacing it with a Kevin Smith poll, because I have a question and I'm genuinely interested in seeing it answered. Come back to see the question and vote, please do. I have no idea what the answer will be.

At Comic-Con this weekend, Tim Kring announced that Kevin Smith will be writing and directing one of the Heroes Origins episodes. My immediate thought was: Who will care? Now, that's not a statement that nobody will care but a genuine question. Who will care?

Maybe I'm being blind, but Smith seems to have suffered a serious drop-off in interest over the last few years. Emphasis on the seems. Maybe its just in my circle, or the areas of the web I frequent, but it looks to me like nobody has anywhere nearly the amount of interest in Kevin Smith that they used to. Nobody likes him as much; nobody dislikes him as much.

Is Kevin Smith now just part of the geek furniture? And is this furniture getting unfashionable as well as slightly uncomfortable?

I didn't much care for Clerks 2 at all. It struck me as somewhat forced, overly familiar if not exactly cliched, and smacking of amateurism. I was tempted to buy the DVD because, for whatever reason, I absolutely love DVD special features and Smith and Co are really pretty good with those. In fact, I still might. I'm far more interested in seeing the special features on a Smith DVD than the film itself - and I'm also not entirely sure that's a bad thing.

While Zack and Miri sounds rather uninspiring, and the much-distributed script excerpt didn't so much wash over me as wander past me, on the other side of the street in a crowd of anonymous, faceless passers by, I do have some hope for Red State. Forced to step out of his cinematic comfort zone much more than usual, Smith might actually deliver soemthing fresh (though still quite undernourished in many ways, I'd expect, and hardly perfectedly crafted in any audio-visual technical sense).

Judd Apatow is delivering more of what Smith promised in each film than Smith has managed in four of his films combined.

Chasing Amy is, for my money, Smith's best work - it has his voice, it sustains an interesting argument, it has a argely untroubled narrative flow, the cast are, on average, the best he's had. Clerks I definitely enjoyed - though I felt it suffered from a Christmas every-day disease, where you could loop it, have a mobius strip of Clerks, and no matter where you started watching, you'd find it very funny for twenty or thirty minutes then find, in fact, it was grinding you down somewhat. Score another point for Smith on DVD - Clerks in small doses is all the more viable.

And my next favourite of his films? Jersey Girl. Not a popular choice - it is somewhat underrated. But mark my words - my selection wasn't going to be any of the others. Least favourite: Dogma, which is barely a film, but an illustrated radio play and a droning, unsubtle one at that, perfunctorily illustrated and not making full use of the wonderful potential of radio at all.

Let alone the potential of film.

So, are you excited that Kevin Smith will be 'doing' Heroes? Why? And should I be?