The reviews for Kevin Smith's new movie,Yoga Hosers, are...not great. If you don't believe it, just listen to Kevin Smith tell you all about it. The director made a special episode of his podcast Hollywood Babble-On so that he could experience the bad reviews live on camera, for the first time. While the entire discussion is worth checking out, Watch below beginning about 16 minutes in where Smith truly gets hit with both barrels by critics.
For the most part, Smith takes it all pretty well. From the beginning, he's even forced to accept that some of the criticisms are valid. Does he make his movies mostly to appeal to his existing circle of fans, and well, family? Yes, yes he does. While he says he hopes that everybody likes Yoga Hosers, he can't really disagree with the idea that it's really designed to be enjoyed by a particular group. He apparently can't really argue with the concept that movie is "meta-awfulness." The effects were cheap, the budget wasn't much to be impressed by.
The primary point of contention really seems to be that all of the things that the critics are criticising just aren't things that that Kevin Smith believes should count as negatives. One review accused the writer of being high when he came up with the idea for the film, something Smith freely admits was the case.
It all seems like something that was hatched during a particularly neuron-impaired free-association game.
The Village Voice accuses Yoga Hosers of being an SCTV sketch, but since Smith likes SCTV, he's ok with it.
At its core, Yoga Hosers isn't a movie: It's a podcast riff given material form; a bong rip visualized; an SCTV sketch devoid of laughs.
At one point, Kevin Smith starts to explain that the reason the reviews don't seem to get to him is that nobody can really get to him because he's simply making the movies that he feels he needs to make. He's happy he made the movie. He understands the problems that people had, but he doesn't feel like he had a choice but to make the film the way he did. It's the art he wanted to make. If he made it another way, it wouldn't be his art.
If you were looking for some fun heat between Kevin Smith and critics you certainly didn't get it here. It's not that surprising. Smith's recent films have been hit pretty hard by critics and he says himself that he was expecting the critics to hate Yoga Hosers. At some point, you have to either learn to deal with critical response and not let it bother you, or you have to get out of the business.
Did you see Yoga Hosers? Do you agree with the critics? Let us know in the comments.
