Clerks actually has a lot of polar changes in that filler, though. As the topics of conversation change, your mind goes with it and your emotions shift. Similar to other "geek out" movies.
On the contrary, and just pulling a number out of my butt because I haven't watched in in awhile, I'd say there's like 20 conflicts and resolutions throughout the course of the plot. Maybe this makes the movie more of an epistolary than the three-act structure that movies are normally compared against, so zooming out until some overarching consistency emerges is not always the most faithful mode of analysis.