When Kevin Smith shot "Clerks" for $27,575, he'd received a small amount of film school training but was a babe in the woods when it came to the crucial aspect of directing actors. It shows in the movie, which is so stiffly performed that I've never been able to connect to it. The screenplay is undeniably hilarious and wise in the ways of the workaday convenience store world, but Smith's actors seem so oddly strangled. It's not the kind of acting you get in a poorly rehearsed community theater production where you can see the actors struggling to remember their lines; it's more like you're watching people who've been unnaturally directed. Their performances are really those of their director, not their own.

The off performances in "Clerks" and "Mallrats" began to make sense years later when I heard that Smith had a penchant for committing the cardinal sin of directing. Be it theater,...