Just relax your eyes…
Mallrats loitered on Home Video today in 1996, after getting stink-palmed by an October 20th, 1995 theatrical release.
Hanging out was the national pastime in the 90s, and all you needed was a couple of smokes, a cup of coffee, and a little bit of conversation. Though two out of three wasn’t bad. When Kevin Smith became the critical darling du jour after Clerks hit in 94, he had the audacity to follow up that success with yet more slackers hanging out and having endless conversations about Star Wars, comic books and sex. Only this time, he replaced the indie existentialist soul-searching with a John-Hughesian rom com set in a mall… and that was a pretty bold move considering there had been a drought in the genre for several years.
It was an earnest, sincere and goofy love letter written in fluent Gen X, so of course it bombed.
Maybe it looked like was trying just too damn hard. But I was there that first week, sitting in a half-empty theatre with a date who didn’t appreciate it one iota. I saw what he was doing, the world-building, the fan service, the ironic nostalgia, and I was fully on board. That love letter got to me.
For some, he was merely repeating his greatest hit with a bigger budget and bigger names, but for many of us of a certain age, he was ripping yet another page out of our post-graduate pop-culturally addled lives. He wrote what he knew, and he knew what we knew: just hanging out and talking shit about shit you love is awesome.
The date didn’t work out, but my love of Mallrats remains true. Snoogans.