I just got back from a screening/focus group session/chit-chat for the sequel to Clerks^•. The fortune cookie from Frontier Wok warned me to “invest, but never speculate”. Good advice, especially for someone under a non-disclosure agreement. Two things first:

1. I love my iPod Shuffle. Not in a heterosexual, male bonding kind of way. This is gay, sexual, and religious. Four and a half hours on the road listening to great music, without having to fumble around with tapes that contain the same shit I listened to the last time I took a road trip, or worse, the same tapes I listened to on the way up. The iPod is a horrible, horrible thing for the environment. It made those four hours fly by.
2. Amoeba Records is almost worth visiting LA for on its own. Visiting Amoeba was one of the reasons I chose to take this opportunity to head up north. I planned to spend a few hours browsing around Amoeba before heading out to the screening, but after an hour of browsing I realized I had already chosen nearly a hundred dollars worth of albums, and I cut the visit short.

I can’t say too much about Clerks II because I’m under the aforementioned NDA. I can say that I was there, and whether the movie sucked or did not suck. It did not suck, not by a long shot. There are a lot of other things I’d like to say about this movie and how it does things compared to other movies, but that will have to wait until it comes out. Until then, I can safely say that Clerks fans will enjoy it, Kevin Smith fans will enjoy it, and I suspect a lot of other people will, too. It was very, very funny. The entire group laughed, simultaneously, a lot; it was, even at this point, tightly edited and on target.

This screening was also an opportunity to get a fascinating glimpse at a director still in the midst of editing their movie. Seeing Kevin Smith talk about his movie, and discuss the changes he wants to make, can’t make, and will think about, made me want to revisit the script for It Isn’t Murder If They’re Yankees that I haven’t written yet.

In any case, I’m looking forward to seeing the finished Clerks II. It is going to be a lot of fun.