An Evening With Kevin Smith 2 – Evening Harder

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: C-     Concerts: B-

 

 

Kevin Smith’s film career has been choppy and odd of late.  Clerks 2 may have seemed regressive to some, but more have wondered why his involvement in high profile projects like Superman, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Green Hornet fell though.  Had he run out of ideas?  Were his scripts to smart, stupid, geeky and/or problematic?  Well, his new DVD stand-up comedy concert set An Evening With Kevin Smith 2 – Evening Harder proves that interesting ideas are there and we get some stories of how things go wrong in the film business.

 

Smith actually engages the audience more than expected and being the cult and fanboy figure he is, gets the expected excess of rude, opportunistic and strange questions more than interesting ones.  He also has his unique style of humor, marked at their most awkward by comments about sex and religion.  If you have never seen him like this before (and this critic had not), you might want to check out this set.  I am not going to go into the humor or ruin any jokes, but after watching both, he obviously has more to offer as a filmmaker than is making it to the screen.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on both concerts is not bad, but not great, with a sense of softness to both, though the British second disc has better color.  They are fine for what they are.  That includes the Dolby Digital 5.0 mixes that spread around the ambiance audio while keeping Smith towards the front speakers.  Very short pieces on each are the only extras, though DVD 2 has a bunch of trailers for other Sony DVD releases.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo