An Evening With Kevin Smith Details

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Don't be put off by the criminally brief synopsis above - <b>An Evening with Kevin Smith</b> contains 2 disc and 3 hours 45 minutes of highlights from Kevin's 2002 lecture tour of US colleges. The word "lecture" conjures images of stuffy professors, overhead projectors and a strange smell of Ajax mixed with dope, but this is nothing of the sort. If you've ever seen Kevin doing interviews or Roadside Attractions on <i>The Tonight Show</i>, you have a taste of what he's like in these shows.

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The basic format is a question and answer session with Kevin at a podium in front of an auditorium full of students. They come up to a mike in the aisle and proceed to ask Kevin a variety of humdingers, ranging from queries about his movies and past, through various offers for him to come back and "just party, dude" and even pointed questions about his sexual proclivities - every answer Kevin gives is one, some or all of interesting, funny, and somewhat self-deprecating.

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Kevin gives insight into the production of his movies, his breakneck path into the industry, offers many anecdotes about his friends, his family, movie studios, <i>High Times</i> and the plate of weed, what people will do for five bucks, why he hates Tim Burton and a 45 minute saga of his trek to Paisley Park to make a documentary about Prince.

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There are no clips from his movies, no guest appearances from his troupe of actors - except Jason Mewes, who really doesn't seem lucid enough to be on the stage! - it's just Kevin, the audience and you, and it's fantastic.

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Nice guy, shame about the audience

If this were a 90 minute film, it would easily be Smith's funniest feature since Chasing Amy - but it's a 150 minute film so kind of drags on a bit.

As other reviewers have said, it's worth watching only if you skip to the stories about the Prince documentary that never was and the Superman film that never was.

One thing that REALLY spoiled it for me was the audience - these Evenings are filmed at US Universities, where the cream of America's intelligent youth are, yet after almost every word anyone says you're deafened by screams and cries of 'WHOOOOO! YEAH!!!!!! ALRIGHT!!!!!', one woman gets a round of applause for spelling her name correctly... George Bush will definitely get a second term.