I don't appreciate your ruse, ma'am

Praise God, Kevin Smith has a blog! This is an absolutely perfect, entertaining, thoroughly readable forum for an overwriter such as himself. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of his*, but some of me was rolling my eyes at Banky yelling at Ben Affleck that "the time will come when I have to throw down the gauntlet!" I've always sort of wished that Kevin wrote books instead of screenplays; he seems like so much more of a novelist than a screenwriter. Jersey Boy wants to WRITE, and sometimes it doesn't work for characters in movies to have such grammatically correct, uncomfortably articulate soliloquies. But he's got a bunch of movies under his belt and I'm sitting on the couch, so who am I?

How do we feel about Clerks II? (Jaek, this could be inspiration for your blogging block.) Does the Clerks phenomenon work no matter what (like Dazed and Confused) or do you have to be a certain age to fully appreciate it (like Rent)? I sort of love Kevin Smith on principle, and he's had plenty of time to think through this sequel, but I'm just curious about what this experience will be like, all these years later. Probably funny but totally different than the first, but with all the same characters, as always (which is actually a facet of his moviemaking that I find more endearing than enough already).

It'd be great if Dante was still kicking around the Quick Stop. I take it by the movie title that maybe he still is.

*In college I had a poster from Chasing Amy signed by him: "Red, had her. Honest" with an arrow pointing to Joey Lauren Adams.