Mallrats (Kevin Smith, 1995)

Art James, Jeremy London, Jason Lee, and Brian O'Halloran in Mallrats

Cast: Jeremy London, Jason Lee, Shannen Doherty, Claire Forlani, Ben Affleck, Michael Rooker, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Priscilla Barnes, Joey Lauren Adams, Ethan Suplee, Brian O'Halloran, Sven-Ole Thorsen, Art James, Stan Lee. Screenplay: Kevin Smith. Cinematography: David Klein. Production design: Dina Lipton. Film editing: Paul Dixon. Music: Ira Newborn. 

The success of his microbudget indie Clerks (1994) gave Kevin Smith the clout and the cash to make a more ambitious feature, but some think Smith was undone by his own success, overloading Mallrats with too much plot and too many extraneous characters and incidents. This comedy about the misadventures of two motormouth slackers is a bit too frantic and uninvolving, and some of its slapstick stunts centered on Smith's duo of Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are poorly conceived. There's a gross-out joke that's more gross than funny, a bludgeoning of an Easter Bunny that comes out of nowhere, and an encounter with a topless fortune teller (Priscilla Barnes) that belongs in some other movie. You kind of have to be a fan of Smith's better films, especially Clerks, Chasing Amy (1997), and Dogma (1999), to be in the frame of mind to put up with the misfires in Mallrats.   

Chasing Amy (Kevin Smith, 1997)

Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams in Chasing Amy

Holden McNeil: Ben Affleck
Alyssa Jones: Joey Lauren Adams
Banky Edwards: Jason Lee
Jay: Jason Mewes
Silent Bob: Kevin Smith
Hooper X: Dwight Ewell

Director: Kevin Smith
Screenplay: Kevin Smith
Cinematography: David Klein
Production design: Robert Holtzman
Film editing: Scott Mosier, Kevin Smith
Music: David Pirner

The treatment of sexual identity in movies and on TV becomes a more sensitive topic every year, so it's nice to see that Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy hasn't dated as much in the past 20 years as it could have. Just hearing that the plot involves a love affair between a straight guy and a lesbian sets off all sorts of alarms about misconceptions of sexual orientation, including the old canard that the "right guy" (or woman) could "convert" someone to heterosexuality. Actually, even in 1997 that idea would have been derided and protested off the screen, but there is sometimes a sense in Chasing Amy that Smith is walking on eggshells. What we have instead is a thoughtful portrait of the complexities of youthful sexual experimentation along with a scathingly satiric one of the ways in which men misunderstand women, gay or straight. The penultimate scene in which Holden (a deliciously Salingerian choice of name) attempts to prove his bona fides to Alyssa is brilliantly, cringingly, painfully funny.