Kevin Smith made a lot of mistakes with Clerks II, but perhaps the most egregious was casting Jason Lee as a yuppie scumbag. The problem with that casting is that Lee’s face is now dominated by his awful My Name is Earl mustache, and putting a pink shirt on him will not change that fact. He couldn’t have looked less like a yuppie if he had had the Batman logo shaved in his head.
That mustache must dominate Jason Lee’s life. I once flew on a plane with him from Los Angeles to New York, and the mustache draws so much attention to him (“Who is that white trash guy in first class?”) that it almost obscures his celebrity. And the mustache cannot go: My Name is Earl is Lee’s bread and butter these days.
Which means that all film roles must be built around the mustache, and thus: Krater. It’s Lee’s next picture, and in it he’s playing the leader of a rock band, Krater, that becomes massively successful after it hires a new singer who has “Broadway ambitions.” Here’s where the mustache comes in: the movie is set in the late 70s and early 80s.
Krater’s a comedy, but I don’t exactly get the joke. I would say half the lead singers for the crummy metal outfits of the 80s had lead singers who sounded like they were trying out for Phantom of the Opera. Hell, Sebastian Bach was ON Broadway, in Jekyll & Hyde (and the guy did Broadway after wearing a shirt that said AIDS: Kills Fags Dead. Talk about a hostile audience). Krater shoots during Earl’s break in May.