Jay and Silent Bob Reboot

Two-thirds of the way through writer-director Kevin Smith's self-stimulated Jay and Silent Bob Reboot the stagnant pair catch up with Ben Affleck's Holden and Joey Lauren Adams' Alyssa from Chasing Amy, the former lovers now co-parenting (along with Alyssa's wife) a child played by Jason Mewes' real life daughter. As expected, Holden looks older. His once buoyant hair has been trimmed short and his goatee is gone. He talks about his failed relationships, specifically an inability to make any lasting romantic connections. Also mentioned is the pain he's suffered in making himself the sole focus of his life and how that level of expectation has crushed him. Then Holden talks about fatherhood: the reassurance that comes with the certainty that somebody really and truly does love him. Smith's dense, motormouth dialogue - genuinely insurmountable for many of his actors - spills out of Affleck with a drilled ease. This extremely brief (but touching) interlude aside, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is an agonising, two-hour pummelling that is premised entirely on the implied goodwill that the filmmakers believe they inherit from a thirty-year deluge of Quick Stop material. As incurious as ever behind the camera, Smith boldly places himself out in front of house for several different roles. His performance as himself, a role lousy with cringing asides about how useless he is as a director, is irritating enough but his Silent Bob, classically portrayed as the taciturn alternative to his jackrabbit partner, has mouldered into an intolerable mime act with Smith's grimacing face twisted up into a series of painful-looking gurns. 

Mallrats - Extended Cut

Perhaps test audiences aren't always the unthinking, dim-witted blob they're made out to be? At least in terms of writer-director Kevin Smith's original submission of Mallrats, the terminal impatience of these viewers, who have very likely been tricked into submitting feedback for a movie they don't necessarily even want to see, did yield workable results. In its longer form Smith's second feature opens with Jeremy London's tongue twisted TS accidentally firing a prop musket at New Jersey's sozzled governor, an event that sounds hilarious when you're reading about it on a fan site in the early 2000s but, in practice, has all the vim and vigour of a similar interlude in a latter-day Police Academy sequel. Hazard a listen to this film's cast-and-crew commentary and you'll hear Smith relay the note that his film is dead in the water until TS and Jason Lee's delightfully abrasive Brodie make it to their prized galleria and, a few glimpses of the autumnal American suburbs aside, whichever frustrated audience member made that call is exactly right. 

That this shopping centre must be physically traversed is an immediate boon for Smith and cinematographer David Klein, it makes the agonisingly long, static mediums that the director defaults to a little less likely. Smith, who began his career maxing out credit cards to buy black-and-white Kodak stock for Clerks, clearly isn't then inclined to waste precious celluloid with pick-ups, reverse angles or inserts. For this follow-up Smith largely favours a style of coverage and storytelling that lends itself well to interlaced television or, a little more charitably, the panned-and-scanned home video market. There are a few stray notes of John Hughes in evidence, not least the casting of Renée Humphrey as a sexualised Molly Ringwald stand-in or Ben Affleck as a Buzz McCallister who has grown into a buttfucking bully, but Smith isn't interested in rallying against middle-class malaise or indulging the childlike flights of fancy that Hughes delighted in. Mallrats isn't reflective in that sense, it's a film about twentysomethings made by twentysomethings. Received as an affront on its original release, with American critics behaving as if the second coming of Jim Jarmusch had squandered his talents on a listless Animal House knock-off, and poorly served in this cut by an excruciating prologue, all the good sense and carefully considered criticism in the world melt away when confronted by the pure sunshine that is the late Shannen Doherty smiling and battering talk show drums while a Weezer B-side plays.