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*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+ starring Austin Zajur, Nicholas Cirillo, Reed Northrup, Ken Jeong written and directed by Kevin Smith
by Bill Chambers What is Kevin Smith’s most personal film to date? Inveterate online cinephiles trapped in a parasocial relationship with him such as myself might say it’s still his first, Clerks, a comic ode to the plight of the American convenience-store worker shot at the very same Quik Stop that employed him at the time. Or is it Chasing Amy, a movie that allegorizes Smith’s burgeoning romance with actress Joey Lauren Adams, for whom he wrote the female lead? Could it be Jersey Girl, his fantasy of widowhood and single-fatherhood and Ben Affleck-hood? Howzabout Clerks III, in which Smith used his “widowmaker” heart attack as a jumping-off point to tell the story of the making of Clerks? All good guesses, but according to Smith, his “most personal film to date” is his most recent, The 4:30 Movie, about three Jersey teens hanging out at the movies in the summer of ’86. The erstwhile Silent Bob has had alter egos before (Dante from Clerks, for instance, although in Clerks III Dante and Randal are possibly Kevin Smith split in two), but not like Brian David (Austin Zajur), a stocky film geek with the gift of gab.
This is Smith telling you who he was before he picked up a camera. It’s his Hope & Glory, his Diner, his The 400 Blows (laugh it up, Kev). The 4:30 Movie is a roman à clef, in other words, one glazed in the particularly navel-gazing nostalgia of a former ’80s kid weaned on summer blockbusters and VHS schlock. Have you ever heard a Gen-Xer wax poetic about youthful cinephilia? Proustian madeleines, all the way down. They’ll tell you about how they finally found a copy of Eraserhead by looking in the Educational section of their suburban video store. How they went to see Back to the Future while on vacation in Florida, came home, and saw it again. How they traversed the vector of downtown movie theatres at least once a month, begging like a Dickensian street urchin for posters to hang on their bedroom walls, which is the main reason they can tell you without Googling that Ralf Bode shot Uncle Buck. These are formative experiences of mine, but they’re a long way from cocktail-party anecdotes, let alone stories. Like dreams, the retelling of these scenes from childhood doesn’t generate any friction. Neither does The 4:30 Movie.
Brian David has carried a torch for cute Melody Barnegat (Siena Agudong) ever since they had a brief fling the previous summer. He summons the courage to call her up for a date, and she agrees to meet him for a late (4:30, natch) matinee of Bucklick when she gets off work. I liked this opening scene, the way she repeatedly chirps, “You sure know a lot about movies!” because he becomes hopelessly pedantic whenever the conversation even lightly grazes the subject of film. Girls said this to me, too. I always tried to take it as a compliment, but what I hear now is, “Please shut the fuck up about movies!” Agudong wisely imbues the line with a touch of passive-aggression, though there unfortunately isn’t a great deal to Melody Barnegat beyond her moniker, which you will hear so often it will start to make you twitch. This mantra-like repetition of names is one of Smith’s favourite storytelling hacks. It’s meme-ing as character development, and it’s how he built the View Askew metaverse without doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The rest of The 4:30 Movie is Mallrats but at a multiplex (Smith’s real-life Smodcastle Cinemas, playing its younger self, Atlantic Cinemas). Brian David and his two best friends, Vic Damone-ish Burny (Nicholas Cirillo) and wrestling nut Belly (Reed Northrup), bide their time ’til Brian’s date screen-hopping–that is, buying a ticket and using it to ping-pong between movies. They have enemies in the draconian ratings system (the much-anticipated Bucklick, Smith’s beloved Fletch by any other name, has an R rating) and the theatre’s power-mad manager (Ken Jeong), who lives to eject unruly kids from his establishment. In Canada, not many movies get an R because it means that no one under 18 is allowed to see them, even if accompanied by a parent or guardian.[i] My pal and I went to a sneak preview of Backdraft when we were 16 and worked up the courage to stick around for the R-rated The Silence of the Lambs afterwards. Moments before it began, the manager, who knew me from my poster-scrounging days, materialized and cleared a row of teenagers who had the same idea. I accidentally made eye contact with him as he escorted them out, and he said, “Hi Bill! Enjoy the show.” It was then I realized my disability played a Jedi mind trick on the gatekeepers, cloaking my real age. That was the summer I became a hard-R connoisseur, seeing everything from Mobsters to Double Impact. Mmmm, madeleines. But I digress.
Tensions flare between our heroic trio when Brian starts to resent Burny’s premature characterization of Melody Barnegat as the Yoko Ono of their friend group. Later, Burny calls her an “Ewok-looking bitch,” and Brian throws a punch. In his Blu-ray commentary, Smith admits the obvious: that nothing like this ever transpired between him and the real-life Burny, who is this film’s producer. So much of The 4:30 Movie feels like the ChatGPT interpolation of a Kevin Smith joint, down to the Martian strangeness of Belly masturbating to the words “SEX POO,” written in magic marker on a bathroom stall. As in Mallrats, there is an inspirational encounter with a celebrity–in this case, a fictitious wrestler known as Major Murder (Sam Richardson). Because Kevin Smith is a Comic Book Man, a Batmobile figures heavily in the climax. In a Marvel-style mid-credits tag that elicits the same feelings of doom as a loved one’s relapse, Brian considers applying for a job at the Quik Stop..
I should mention at this point that I was caught off guard by how much I liked Smith’s previous film, Clerks III. One of the reasons I hated Clerks II is that it felt disconnected from any tangible reality for Kevin Smith. Returning to the original’s self-referential roots, the morbidly fascinating Clerks III found Randal deciding to put his and Dante’s perversely uncinematic lives on screen, just as Smith did in the early 1990s. The characters, of course, are in a vastly different place than Smith was during that time–Smith was inspired by the example of Slacker, the clerks are motivated by the hovering spectre of death; Smith was still on the precipice of adulthood, the clerks are middle-aged failures–and the world is no longer looking for the next Richard Linklater, but that’s a feature, not a bug. The mock-Clerks within Clerks III doesn’t catch fire or launch careers, and it certainly doesn’t stave off mortality, because Smith isn’t telling the story of his own meteoric rise (there’s already a Scottish movie called Shooting Clerks for that)–he’s focused on the narcissism of filmmaking and the hidden tariffs of pursuing one’s dreams. Where youthful notions of artistic integrity almost led to Clerks ending in a fatal holdup at the Quik Stop, Clerks III comes by its grim coda more organically, which is to say from the wisdom of age. It’s a dopey All That Jazz, and I mean that affectionately.
Clerks III’s decisive move away from fan service and cozy nostalgia felt less self-conscious than Smith’s off-brand trilogy of Red State, Tusk, and Yoga Hosers. It may, however, have been a cry for help. A few months after the 2022 release of Clerks III, Smith ended a long-term dependency on marijuana. Then, in a Facebook post on the fifth anniversary of his heart attack, he wrote[ii], “Happy to be alive today, of course – but also sad for those I’ve hurt and the damage I’ve done since surviving. To borrow from “Pet Sematary”: Sometimes, dead is better.” Subsequently, Smith had a breakdown and checked himself into a mental-health facility, where he gained new tools for coping with repressed trauma that didn’t involve constantly seeking the approval of his adoring public. So I get it, this retreat to comfort zones, and he doesn’t owe us anything. But for someone who has since spoken so frankly about the abuse and body-shaming he endured in his youth to turn around and make a memory piece as weightless as The 4:30 Movie is disappointing, to say the least. (The occasional short jokes lobbed at Brian ain’t cutting it.) It doesn’t even have the substance of reverie that Smith’s podcasts and TV shows do whenever he goes on a tangent about growing up in Highlands, except perhaps during a miles-long list in the closing credits that finds Smith thanking everyone from Nerf to “the kitchen phone” for “[giving] me such a happy childhood.”
Coming out around the same time as The 4:30 Movie, Adam Rehmeier’s semi-autobiographical Snack Shack brings all its shortcomings into stark relief. Snack Shack manages to talk about male friendships, first love, mentors, PTSD, and death at no expense to its Clerks-ian low concept–two potty-mouthed 15-year-old stoner boys in the ’90s reopen their local swimming pool’s snack shack for the summer–and sense of humour. (Their business takes off when they start selling hot dogs with swear words written in mustard to kids at a markup.) Snack Shack is funny, sexy, and just a little sad, and it looks like cinema. The 4:30 Movie, not exactly: it’s milky, flat, Paramount+-ready; the camera weaves and bobs but rarely lands on a dynamic composition. The Grindhouse-style faux trailers and clips sprinkled throughout are curious, in that sense, as they suggest Smith’s aesthetic boundaries miraculously expand when he’s doing an imitation, like how Barney Rubble could sing beautifully provided he was in the shower. For what it’s worth, the one for the Angel spoof Sister Sugar Walls, featuring Smith’s not-untalented daughter Harley Quinn Smith as a nun by day/hooker by night and Jason Mewes as one of her johns, pried a laugh out of me.
I mean, The 4:30 Movie is not without its madeleines. The adrenaline rush of a girl saying “yes” to a date. Going to that one shop in your Podunk that carries STARLOG. Looking forward to the trailers as the red curtains part on a nice, wide screen. Yet the movie all but hemorrhages goodwill. It’s kind of profound when Mallrats‘ very own Jason Lee, an actor Smith created in his image, shows up as Brian’s dad and thus a surrogate for Smith’s father, but the poignancy of it is left to wither–Smith is just cashing in some clout to bedazzle a paper-thin characterization. See also: the desperate typecasting of Jeong, whose comedy stylings strand this ’80s-set comedy in 2012. Can I confess that the problematic but heartfelt Chasing Amy was on the other day and, a few bars into Dave Pirner’s wistful opening theme, I began to cry? It transported me right back to 1997, to my early twenties and film school, when being the next Kevin Smith was actually aspirational. To my unreciprocated feelings for a classmate, which I saw reflected in the picture’s doomed love affair and thought would eat me alive, before I knew this life of perpetual masking and booster shots and waiting for mad billionaires to grind me into bio diesel. I miss that romantic melancholy now, because underneath it I was burning with hope and potential. And those fires are out, man, but we’ll always have these madeleines. Watching The 4:30 Movie, I wondered why you’d make a period piece if you’ve already built a time machine.
THE BLU-RAY DISC Lionsgate brings The 4:30 Movie to disc in separate Blu-ray and 4K UHD releases. We received the former for review, which presents the film in a sharp and reasonably cinematic 1.85:1, 1080p transfer, though the movie’s rather wan palette had me longing for the wider colour gamut of HDR, whether or not the 4K alternative does improve on it. Contrast hovers in the mid-range in a way that says “the past,” I suppose, but throwing a few extra nits at the highlights might lend the picture a bit more visual interest, and a less stingy bit budget–the 90-minute feature only takes up 13.6 GB of a BD-25–could conceivably wring more detail out of the soupy shadows. Believe it or not, The 4:30 Movie comes with a Dolby Atmos mix. It’s fine but, at least in its 7.1 Dolby TrueHD mixdown, hardly earth-shaking. Although I’m hard-pressed to name a standout moment, the dialogue is pinprick-clear and the music–pop songs and Bear McCreary score alike–is crisp and enveloping.
Smith’s feature-length yakker is typically breathless and discursive. He makes you appreciate some period details that don’t seem like period details on the surface, like how the picture opens with a teenager using a phone to talk. In that same scene, he observes all sorts of ’80s ephemera cultural and personal dotting Brian’s kitchen (Star Wars glasses, Snoopy soap, a report card pinned to the fridge); there’s texture here, but alas it has to be pointed out. I was a little taken aback to hear that Brian David actor Austin Zajur, who previously played a mini-Silent Bob in Clerks III, has been dating Smith’s daughter offscreen for five years. (“Hello, Freud? You know that new sound you’re looking for? Well, listen to this!”) “Brian David,” we learn, was Smith’s given name at birth, until his mother changed it to avoid confusion with another baby. Why isn’t that in The 4:30 Movie? Still, Smith is pretty endearing in this context, especially in his haste to echo his onscreen counterpart’s fondness for director Martha Coolidge.
Comprising the video-based supplements, “Coming Home Again: Making The 4:30 Movie” (23 mins., HD) is a typical talking-heads making-of clearly shot at Smodcast Cinemas and dominated by a newly svelte Smith in one of his David Byrne big-suit outfits. There is some crossover with the yak-track in his remarks but less than you’d expect. Of his desire to write something around Smodcast Cinemas, Smith says he didn’t want to do ‘Clerks in a movie theatre’ (“Ushers“) because his only experience of movie theatres prior to owning one was as an audience member. Zajur says he based his portrayal on recordings a conspicuously nerdy Kevin Smith made in his teens with former producing partner Scott Mosier. He calls them “podcasts,” the sweet summer child–in 1986, we called talking into a tape-recorder with fellow dorks “radio.” The 4:30 Movie‘s theatrical trailer rounds out the platter. Maddeningly, none of this bonus material is subtitled for the deaf and hard of hearing. Note that the Blu-ray comes with DVD and digital copies of the film.
88 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); English Dolby Atmos (7.1 TrueHD core); English SDH, Spanish subtitles; BD-25 + DVD-5; Region A; Lionsgate
[i] Despite owning a movie theatre, Smith appears to be operating under the presumption that this is also how it works in the States, but in reality his 17-year-old protagonists would have no trouble attending the R-rated Bucklick or Dental School, so long as they left the younger Melody Barnegat at home.
[ii] The full text of that post reads: “5 years ago, I had a heart attack. Happy to be alive today, of course – but also sad for those I’ve hurt and the damage I’ve done since surviving. To borrow from “Pet Sematary”: Sometimes, dead is better. However, I’m not dead yet. So to borrow once more from a King: “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” As much as I want to, I cannot change the past. All I can do is make it better for today. So that’s what I’ll endeavor to do. Every day. Until the Reaper returns. Today marks my 5th week without weed. I feel less numb and more present than I have in 10 years or more. No judgment on my green friends, but this is how I want to live from now on. I weighed 285 pounds the night of my widow maker heart attack – 45 lbs down from my all-time high of 330 lbs. Today, I weigh 180 – my adult thinnest. Change is possible. If you’re green, you’re growing. If you’re ripe, you’re rotting. And I’m done being rotten. Every day is a school day. And I’m willing to learn. Memento Mori.”
