6. Clerks
Created on a budget of just over $27,000 (roughly the amount of money Robert Downey, Jr. pays someone to dust the gold-plated shelf where all of his Academy Awards should be), Kevin Smith's debut foray into directing stands as a testament to what can happen with a little bit of moxie and a notepad full of dick and fart jokes. Shot as a "day in the life" story of two friends, Dante and Randal, Clerks is equal parts messy, mundane, and masterful, with Smith utilizing some of his "film student ingenuity" in ways that might appear a tad pretentious on the surface. And Clerks is exactly that in many ways. But when your main story is about a couple of lackadaisical twenty-somethings with an itch for grandeur who can't stop sitting around talking about Return of the Jedi all day, that pretentiousness plays very effectively. Clerks is a case of unknowingly fortunate circumstances, where the budget simply wouldn't allow for the full color palette to be on display, thus necessitating the unvarnished look into Smith's slacker world. With a little extra color, who knows if the film would have maintained the grungy vibe that it ultimately owes its enduring legacy to?