TheRetroCritic

It's funny how some movies shouldn't work and technically don't but totally do. Mallrats is one of those movies. Cinematically, it's all over the place. As a romantic comedy, it gets pretty corny and you could literally take out TS's (Jeremy London) subplot out entirely, replace it with more dick jokes and the whole movie would be even better for it. Not classier but better. As it stands, the tone is kinda hit-and-miss and some of the performances either fall flat (Claire Forlani's Brandi) or are hammy as hell (Michael Rooker). The result is a film which feels like many different types of movies stuck together randomly into some sort of post-modern 90's collage: the dialogs have a Woody Allen-esque verbosity to them every so often, all the Jay and Silent Bob stuff is pure Wile E. Coyote cartoon, the gross out jokes are straight out of something like Caddyshack so it's a weird mix to say the least. That said, as with several other Smith flicks,

Hitchcock blonde Kim Novak’s now famous (or infamous?) expression of displeasure for The Artist ’s use of Bernard Herrmann’s classic Vertigo score may have caused a mini web-quake but how derivative is Michel Hazanavicius’ film, really? And how does that work to the film’s advantage and disadvantage? Looking at the director’s other Jean Dujardin-starring films: namely the OSS 117 duo ( Cairo Nest Of Spies and Lost In Rio ), it’s obvious the man already had a love for aged Hollywood genre movies. OSS 117 channelling the James Bond franchise and 60’s spy capers perfectly. What elevated the films from being pure carbon-copy homages to great comedies, though, really was how its main star stood out from that world. This is a guy who may very well be as misogynistic and insensitive as early Bond himself but for him specifically it’s simply impossible to hide his clueless, bigoted views making him stick out like a sore thumb from an environment seemingly so stylish, clean and perfect (on