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Watched Clerks III last night… I thought it was a lovely film, actually. Kind of a bittersweet ending, killing off Dante, though.
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I’ve watched the movie twice now and am still completely unsatisfied with his death. I get that this is supposed to be a shock to get Randall off of his ass and finally able to acknowledge he’s not the center of the universe, but it doesn’t sit well for me as an appropriate resolution for a character who starts the film carrying so much loss on his shoulders and the last thing he says before he dies is basically he has so much sadness he can’t get over. (I hope I’m not misremembering that. It’s my emotional memory of it, for sure.) But then I’m supposed to be happy that he can now be dead with his wife because that’s the only way he can really be happy? It didn’t work for me, although I otherwise enjoyed the movie. Kevin Smith has never completely failed to entertain me. (No, I have not seen Copout.)
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That’s a good point… I think I need to mull over a response! 
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A friend of mine worked on the NY film festival back in the day and gave me the screener of Clerks before it was picked up by any distributor. In the original cut in the final scene (titled “Denouement”) Dante is shot and killed by an unseen robber. I always thought it was pretty lame that they omitted that scene in the released version. Wish I still had that tape!
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I think it was the distributor who decided not to end the film on that note, and I think Smith had since admitted he only ended it that way because he didn’t know how else to end it.
It’s available as bonus material on some disc releases of the film.
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Yep, it’s in the DVD I have, so if you get the DVD, it should be there as a deleted scene… I didn’t like that ended, as I think it changes the whole movie, so I’m glad he cut it.
Er… or what @GospelX said!
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Pretty much the same here. The only two I’ve watched more than once are Bottle Rocket and Moonrise Kingdom… and the latter thrice because 1) the Boy Scout lunacies and eccentricities took me back to my days as a Boy Scout; 2) my best friend and his wife telling me that the orphaned Boy Scout looked like me, causing still doubtful me to go into WTF!!! mode and needing to verify; and 3) orphan scout and girlfriend Suzy relationship took me back to pre-teen me and family-friends’ adorable niece who declared that she and I would get married someday; made me feel like I was suddenly flying. 
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Same here, but I’d add The Life Aquatic too.
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Am I the only one who liked Darjeeling Limited? It never seems to come up in discussions of his earlier works, but I thought it was Anderson at his peak.
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That might be his only one I haven’t seen (besides Asteroid City). I’ll have to check it out.
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Watched George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing… a lovely film…
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Among the many of his that I’ve seen, I think that’s the worst one.
Good explanations of why:
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I watched Kwaidan over the last few days. It’s a 3 hour anthology of Japanese ghost stories and is absolutely gorgeous. It took me a few days because the storytelling was a bit slow for me, especially over the course of 3 hours. It’s worth watching, though. Beautiful set designs, interesting takes on stories (one story, that apparently shares the same folk DNA as a story appearing in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, ends differently from the original), and honestly feels like a series of dreams.
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I had thought that it was tongue in cheek, making fun of the clueless rich white men stumbling through another country while learning nothing beyond dealing with all their “baggage,” but perhaps I should take a closer look.
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That part Yuki-Onna (Woman of the Snow) was released as a distinct short feature at the time.
Like all anthologies, its a mixed bag. I am lukewarm to the first and last stories (The Black Hair, In a Cup of Tea) but love the middle ones with a passion (Yuki Onna, Hoichi the Earless)
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I’m glad it got a separate release. It was apparently removed for the original US release of the film. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense considering Hoichi is clearly the longest segment and could easily stand on its own.
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I love that one, so beautiful.
Back in the early 90’s I recorded a track based around a sample of her “the snow is warm, the ice is hot” line.
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More broadly, the exhibit shows how Waters effectively invented his own genre of cinema by blending the art films he revered growing up with the sex-and-schlock exploitation movies he found himself drawn to like a rubbernecker to a car wreck. In 1950s Baltimore, the two genres actually got muddled up, as exploitation houses showed European art movies with the promise of more female skin than the Hollywood studios allowed.
“Bergman’s Summer with Monika originally showed in a skin theatre. They called it Sins of Monica and cut a lot of the dialogue,” he recalled.
Well, that’s interesting! What really seperates art house films and “skin flicks”? Especially when you cut much of the dialogue?
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