Clerks III open for business.

For a while now, it hasn't been a secret that filmmaker Kevin Smith, best known for his View Askewniverse series of movies (in which he also plays the character Silent Bob), was planning on retiring from writing/directing feature films to focus on working in other forms of media. His last movie was going to be a hockey movie called Hit Somebody, but that is now going to be a six-part television miniseries instead.

With Hit Somebody no longer being a feature film, the other day, Smith announced on his Twitter account that his last movie will be a third Clerks movie:

                    KEVIN SMITH

          So with the Hit Somebody shift, the minute Jeff Anderson signs on, my
          last cinematic effort as a writer/director will be Clerks III.

For those that don't know, Jeff Anderson is the actor who plays the character Randal Graves in several of the View Askewniverse movies, starting with the first Clerks. From what I've heard, Smith had to do a lot of convincing to get Anderson to be in Clerks II. Since Randal Graves and Dante Hicks (played by Brian O'Halloran) are the main characters in the Clerks movies, obviously a sequel couldn't be made without them.

I don't know about how Anderson feels, but I'm pretty excited about Clerks III. Not being that interested in hockey movies made it seem pretty anticlimactic to me personally for Smith's final movie to be one. I'm glad he's still getting to tell that story, but I'm also glad there will be a third Clerks movie. It's much more fitting as his cinematic grand finale, and I'd just love to see what Dante, Randal, Jay, Silent Bob, and even Elias are up to these days.

Although I don't love every aspect of Clerks II, I think it was a great sequel, and it had some really amazing parts. I know it might sound silly since I'm talking about movies containing jokes about dicks and donkey shows, but something I really love about Smith's movies are the really beautiful and emotional scenes that explore concepts like love and friendship. The jail cell scene in Clerks II is one of my favorites in all of Smith's movies, up there with Silent Bob's Chasing Amy monologue. I'm not at all ashamed to say it makes me cry every time I see it. If Clerks III has the same amount of heart, I can't imagine not loving the movie.

Aside from all that, I realized my post about the idea of Alec Baldwin having a cameo as the live-action Leonardo Leonardo is relevant again, and I'd still love to see that happen. It might be cool to see some of the other characters show up too. Brodie, Steve-Dave, Fanboy, etc. Maybe Ben Affleck could be in there somewhere too. He was da bomb in Phantoms, yo.