Retirement? What retirement? Ok, so Kevin Smith still sounds like he has plans to hang up his camera for good, it's just that he's taking a slightly different route to doing so. Originally, the plan was that his epic hockey film, Hit Somebody, to be his swansong. The film, based on the Warren Zevon song, was to be a two-parter set in the 1970s following a defenseman who wants to score a goal. Smith revealed earlier this week that it will now be broken down into six one-hour episodes for TV. So that leaves him with one more movie to complete before shuffling off. Enter Clerks 3.
Smith took to Twitter where he made the big announcement, complete with flourishing hashtag...
So with the HIT SOMEBODY shift, the minute Jeff Anderson signs on, my last cinematic effort as a writer/director will be CLERKS III.#TaDa
— KevinSmith (@ThatKevinSmith) December 7, 2012
The original Clerks is a classic, and really helped usher in a new wave of small budget independent filmmakers. The story followed Randall Graves(Anderson) and Dante Hicks(Brian O'Halloran), two New Jersey slackers dealing with the pains of working a really crappy job at a convenience store. Clerks 2 was released in 2006, and showed the characters dealing with growing up while still maintaining some level of immaturity. The Clerks films are really the best way to chart the course of Smith's own life, similar to what Judd Apatow does. So I imagine a Clerks 3 would be much the same. If he really is retiring, this would seem to be the perfect way to go out.I don't know if now's the best time for Smith to pack it in, though. He's shown an ability to do different things well, even if I found Red State a little lacking in some ways, and want to see him continue to evolve as a director. He's got a great, unique voice as a filmmaker and it would be terrible to lose that.
