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" He burst on the independent-film scene with his first directorial effort, Clerks, a $27,000 production, which not only won major awards at the 1994 Sundance and Cannes festivals but also has become the subject of his own comic-book title for Jay and Silent Bob&amp;#039;s Secret Stash, a store in Red Bank, New Jersey. And that was just in the last millennium. For our new epoch, the twenty-nine-year-old Smith is toiling on Clerks: The Animated Series, scheduled to appear on ABC sometime in 2000.  Smith&amp;#039;s flair for merchandising and recycling the fruits of his labor is one of the reasons I am betting on him to break out of the low-budget ghetto and into the movie mainstream. Of course, Smith will have to consent to allow himself to be dragged into the lair of the suits with the big cigars. Some years ago, I predicted that Hal Hartley was the most likely Sundance kid to break out of the pack of underfinanced overachievers. So far, I have been proven wrong. Smith is to New Jersey what Hartley is to Long Island, with respect to the sources of their satirically absurdist temperaments, but I suspect that Smith is the cannier businessman of the two. His partnership with Scott Mosier in the production company View Askew, a characteristically witty name in itself, is one sign that his Sundance sensibility has been blessed with Silicon Valley entrepreneurial energy. Another is his versatility as a writer, not only for his four films to date and his comic books but also as a collaborator with indie maven John Pierson on Pierson&amp;#039;s book Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, a zestful account of the past decade&amp;#039;s lo/no-budget filmmaking. In addition, he executive-produced the Best Picture nominee Good Will Hunting, and as if all that weren&amp;#039;t enough, he is a close buddy of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Smith himself even acts, in the recurring role of Silent Bob, in tandem with the talkatively hip Jay, played by Jason Mewes. Paradoxically, as far as my prediction goes, I must confess that I have been overwhelmed by only one of Smith&amp;#039;s four films, but this one winner was a home run with the bases loaded, which more than makes up for his overall batting average. I am speaking, of course, of his sublime Chasing Amy (1997), sparked by the incandescent Joey Lauren Adams. By comparison, Clerks struck me as so-so, Mallrats (1996) less than so-so, and Dogma (1999) a fascinating failure. Still, Smith has established a more-than-respectable groundwork for the presumably higher things to come. What is important is that he has found the financing for four films in five years and is still surviving, thriving, and staying off the streets. I would be happier with Smith if he stopped giving faux-na\u00EFf interviews about his alleged shortcomings as a &amp;quot;visual&amp;quot; director and about how he doesn&amp;#039;t care about the lack of magic in his mise-en-sc\u00E8ne as long as the story and the dialogue click. For one thing, he shouldn&amp;#039;t be providing ammo to reviewers who couldn&amp;#039;t recognize visual style if it conked them on the noggin. For another, it is disingenuous of Smith to claim that he is uninterested in the visual dimension of the cinema when he is at the same time addicted to comic strips, a sure sign of an artist as much obsessed by how things look as how people talk. Chasing Amy, as a case in point, works on all cylinders, visual as well as verbal, to deliver its explosive climaxes. Actually, what is most surprising about Smith is that he is so good a writer and at the same time fully in tune with the subliterate tastes of young audiences. Indeed, his cultural ambidextrousness bodes well for his future. He is conventionally poised to go either way: to dumb down or wise up wherever the movie zeitgeist takes him. Nobody is a sure thing, of course, but barring any massive misadventure, Kevin Smith is a good bet to surge onward and upward in the movie business.  Andrew Sarris is a film critic for The New York Observer and a professor of film at Columbia University. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a1580/kevin-smith-0300/>