Mallrats

For various reasons, a lot having to do with having that three-month free preview of the Showtime channels back in the fall, I've been recording a lot more recentish movies, if by recent you mean made after I was born. One that's only a little more than a quarter century old is Mallrats, which, thanks to the general demise of shopping malls where most stores don't have outdoor entrances, has certainly dated over those 25 years. But it's still an interesting movie.

Jeremy London plays TS Quint, a college student from suburban New Jersey who is on spring break and about to use that spring break to take his girlfriend Brandi Svenning (Claire Forlani) down to Universal Studios to propose to her. However, things have gone wrong. Brandi's father (Michael Rooker) produces a public-access TV dating game show, and was going to use one of Brandi and Quint's mutual friends as a contestant. But Quint's comments to this other woman about the camera making you look fatter made the other woman swim laps to try to lose weight, until she dropped dead. Dad needs a new contestant and Brandi is willng to fill in; Brandi is also unhappy about Quint's role in the other girl's death. So she breaks up with him.

Quint has a best friend in Brodie (Jason Lee). Brodie likes to hang out in his basement, although I don't think the term "man cave" had come into common use in 1995, playing video games. His girlfriend Rene (Shannen Doherty) has grown tired of this, and has decided to break up with Brodie.

What are two best friends with a day to kill to do? Why not drown their sorrows by going to the local mall and walk around, maybe buying a few things? This was, after all, the era when malls were still mostly full, especially malls in bigger suburban areas like northern New Jersey. (Although the movie is set in New Jersey, for economic reasons a mall in Minnesota was used for filming.) At the mall Brodie and Quint run into their friends Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith respectively), as well as the first running joke, of another guy their age who can't find the hidden 3D picture in a "Magic Eye" picture (remember those?).

There's also a high-school girl named Tricia (Renee Humphrey), who is doing "research" on the sex life of young men by actually having sex with them and recording it; one of the people she's "researched" is Shannon (Ben Affleck), manager of one of the clothing stores in the mall. Meanwhile, Quint and Brodie discover that Mr Svenning has gotten the opportunity to show off his game show to suits from the network, and as part of that he's going to be putting on an episode of the show in the mall. When they find this out they enlist the help of Jay and Silent Bob to try to sabotage the show, which is another of the running jokes as the attempts never seem to go quite right.

Also along the way, Brodie gets in a fight with the Easter Bunny, necessitating his and Quint's getting kicked out of the mall and their heading to a much lower-rent mall where Quint gets his fortune told by topless fortune-teller Miss Ivannah. This sends them back to the first mall to try to mend Quint's relationship with Brandi, but that's ultimately going to involve going on the dating show. But certainly Brandi is going to recognize Quint, isn't she?

There are a lot of cultural references in Mallrats that have clearly dated, although that's obviousnly not the fault of the movie. The humor is also decidedly not going to be to everybody's tase, considering how much of it revolves around sex, violence, and other crudities. The humor also sometimes gets in the way of the plot -- or at least that's what I thought until I read that I had recorded the theatrical version. There's a director's cut that I presume fills in some of the plot.

Still, even though I was definitely not the sort of person who was a mallrat back in my late-80s high school days (and we didn't really have a big enough mall to be a mallrat as there wasn't even a food court at the time), I mostely enjoyed Mallrats. Then again, I also enjoyed Booty Call. Suprisingly, I'm not the biggest fan of sex scenes in dramataic movies, but when it comes to raunchy comedy, I don't mind. So if you have the right sort of taste for raunchy, I think you too might like Mallrats.