Joel Siegel Not Sharing Kevin Smith's Donkey-On-Woman Vision
Despite Joel Siegel's limited skills at writing movie reviews—they usually consist of glowing, pun-heavy superlatives, pre-encapsulated for your pullquoting convenience—he nevertheless remains one of America's best known film critics. So when he noisily walked out of a press screening of Kevin Smith's Clerks II, word quickly filtered back to the director, who responded with a vicious rebuttal on his MySpace page. Page Six approached Siegel to give his side of the story, in what has quickly escalated into The Affair of the Fuddy-Duddy Critic Vs. The Foulmouthed Auteur:
"Time to go!" roared Siegel to his fellow critics. "First movie I've walked out of in 30 [bleeping] years!" [...]
Siegel told Page Six: "It was so foul and mean and repulsive. I finally realized I could not say anything positive . . . I wasn't ready for this kind of smut . . . I hope he doesn't make any more movies." [...]
An apoplectic Smith fired back on his MySpace blog: ..."I don't need Joel Siegel to [bleep] my [bleep] the way he apparently [bleeps] M. Night Shyamalan's, gushing over his flick ['The Lady in the Water'] before he's even seen it, but [bleep] man, man - how about a little common [bleeping] courtesy? You never, never disrupt a movie, simply because you don't like it. Cardinal rule of moviegoing: Shut your [bleeping] mouth while the movie's playing.
The two had a live confrontation on this morning's Opie and Anthony Show, in which Siegel insisted he was a big fan of the first Clerks, but defended his right to storm out of any movie he considers unwatchable. Smith shot back that by leaving at the 40-minute mark, he missed a crucial, donkey-sex related plot development. Mercifully, however, he stopped short of revealing just what that was, leaving listeners free to conjure their own mental images of Jay and Silent Bob fumbling with a rope-and-pully contraption rigged above a nervous, reclining Rosario Dawson.
