For the past couple weeks, I’ve been watching a ton of Kevin Smith movies. There’s no real reason for it, I just started watching ‘Dogma’ one day and then decided to check out all the other Kevin Smith stuff I had sitting on my shelf.

Since then, I’ve become weirdly obsessed with checking out the guy’s entire collection. I’ve watched everything from ‘Clerks‘ to ‘An Evening with Kevin Smith‘ and I’ve watched most of them multiple times.

‘Dogma‘ is still my favorite of all of his films, but I have a new appreciation for ‘Clerks‘ that I don’t think I had when I first saw the film years ago. There’s just something that appeals to the writer in me about a guy who can make an entire film about people talking and become a huge success. That goes against so many filmmaking rules you learn in school. There can be no script with page after page of seemingly superfluous dialogue with no action. You have to break the script up with actions every so often so the audience doesn’t get bored watching actors talk. Yet, despite the dialogue-heavy (or completely dialogue-saturated) scenes, the film still works. In fact, it works because the film is so dialogue-heavy.

After getting into ‘Clerks‘ and peeping the longer director’s cut (with video commentary by Smith, producer Scott Mosier, the ridiculously amazing Jason Mewes and Dante and Randal themselves, Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson) I decided to pick up a copy of Smith’s new book “My Boring Ass Life“.

The book, like most of Smith’s work, is very wordy. A lot of people criticize Smith for going on and on (and on and on and on!) in interviews, special edition introductions, blog posts and of course with his dialogue. At 470 pages, the book might seem like a whole lot of Smith going on and on. In fact, it’s a rather interesting read. Like an episoide of ‘Entourage‘ without all the one-night-stands and Ari/Lloyd scenes, the book chronicles Smith’s daily life as a filmmaker. Taken from his blog, Smith writes about topics like taking his daughter Harlery to get her ears pierced, trying to find the female lead for ‘Clerks II‘ and even shooting his small role in ‘Catch and Release‘ up in Canada. That last part was especially interesting for me considering that the Colorado Film Commission had a lot to do with ‘Catch‘ being shot (at least in part) in Boulder.

I’m still not finished with the book, but I am steadily approaching the key segment, a 9-part series called “Me and My Shadow” about Jason Mewes’ battle with heroin addiction. This highly publicized segment got a lot of attention because Smith began it by telling the story of Mewes having sex with Nicole Richie in a bathroom. This got picked up everywhere on tv and the net and Smith even talks about how disheartening it is that the media would rather run a story about bathroom sex with a celebutante than a story about overcoming major drug addiction. While I knew a bit about Mewes’ drug problems, I’m very anxious to hear about the chain of events from the perspective of someone who calls Mewes his “unofficial first-born”.

So, clearly, I’ve been Kevin Smith obsessed for a little while now.

Then, the other day at work, Kevin (the Film Commissioner and my boss) asked me to get some movie posters mounted on foam so we could put them on the walls of the office. I dropped the posters off at Kinko’s and didn’t think much about it. When I went to pick them up, I saw that oone was for none other than ‘Catch and Release‘. Kevin put them on the filing cabinets that are right behind my desk. Now I have a photo of Kevin Smith right behind me at work, and right as I finished off the segment about ‘Catch‘ in his book.

So, aside from having a friend visit, battling a cold, getting my Denver Film Festival tickets together and planning for the big Hall of Fame event we’re doing at work, that’s what I’ve been up to and why I’ve been too busy to blog for a while.