Thanks to all my friends for coming out to watch Mallrats. I watched it way too much in high school/college. Snappy talking friends with way too good for them girlfriends? What’s not to like!
Quite a bit actually. We yelled a lot of things while watching it. Like “These guys won culture” and “These men are awful.” and “Snoochie Boochies”.
It’s absurd how misogynistic the movie is. Like in 80s TnA Comedies there are tits and butts. This movie has Kevin Smith’s real life too-good-for-him-girlfriend in states of undress and then give impassioned monologues about relationships. The movie’s main plot point is the main character insulted a girl who then more or less killed herself. This is played as a joke/serious plot point a dozen times over. COOL HERO WE HAVE.
Even as every turn of the movie says the two main characters are awful we are suppose to be like “but come on, look at these rascals.” Then the movie gives up on these women having motivations for them to say “guess I love these rascals.”
Also sometimes it is a looney tunes cartoon for 3 minutes. It is full of jokes. It is weirdly flat-lit for the entire thing. It is so much worse than I had feared because boy did I take a lot of my personality from this movie and see how well that worked out for my college years. Horrible child men who refuse to do anything in service of their way-better-than-them girlfriends who how the fuck did they start dating in the first place? At least they can ask questions about Star Wars and say what different Iron-Man armors do.
It’s trying to have it both ways that these man-childs are flawed and can’t see past their own nose and yet are still deserving of success and happy story.
But it is trying something and has different ideas bouncing around and again Kevin Smith’s ideal man won pop culture. They absolutely control it now. It fucking sucks. Remember how he ended a movie “beating up” his critics? Shut up asshole.
I keep going back to this Clerk 3’s clip.
Watch a movie die over and over in real time. There are only…references. And like really bad reactions to…bad acting. There’s nothing here. Once again Kevin Smith eatting his own tail endlessly. There was something that Mallrats references and inflects Clerks. It wasn’t in fact just saying shit and letting your buddy Ben Affleck just die on camera “playing a bad character, as a joke.”
Then look up the plot synopsis of Clerks 3 and do not spoil it it but, “What The Fuck.” Yikes. And that movie is a rich person trying to play the poor “what if only failure and duldrums had ever found me.”
I got a lot out of Mallrats. You could study it as a class. You could write papers on it. There are enough good jokes in it. It is horrible to women, constantly, from the beginning. It has stuff about having fun weird friends, and punk rock, and talking about nerd shit in a stupidly serious way and not taking shit from others that clearly resonated with me for many years.
2 out of 5 chocolate pretzels
