Chasing Amy

Remembered as the film in which Ben Affleck is so irresistible that he turns a lesbian straight (and hailing from a time period in which distributor Harvey Weinstein was behaving like a rabid animal in hotels all over the world), Chasing Amy is probably best understood now as writer-director Kevin Smith trying to make sense of why a beautiful woman with much more life experience than him might then find his comparative naivety appealing. Joey Lauren Adams is the subject both in front and behind the camera: the actress luminous onscreen as Alyssa and, presumably, at least a little bit bewildered offscreen as the real-life girlfriend who had prompted Smith to so fully excavate his personal inadequacies. Of course, a handsome actor on the verge of superstardom being cast as Smith's avatar likely took a little of the sting out of this public splaying. If nothing else Affleck, who incidentally sounds uncannily like Smith when the pair share audio commentary tracks, is able to wring an endearing lovesickness out of his writer-director's overwritten dialogue. Affleck's performance here flatters Smith and the writer-director knows it. 

Similarly, in terms of aspirational tweaking, it's difficult not to wonder now if the framing of Alyssa as being much more fluid in her affections than the popular memory suggests is actually a misguided attempt at chivalry? If the character had instead only slept with a great many men, would Smith then be expecting his viewers (particularly a mainstream American audience back in 1997) to value her perspective even less? To side with the jealous and venomously bigoted Banky, as played by Jason Lee? Perhaps such a move might even generate disquiet for Adams the actress, since Smith was never shy about sharing his film's autobiographical underpinning? Gayness in this specific context, and this is discussed within the piece itself, is exciting rather than intimidating for Holden, Alyssa's prospective partner. He, foolheartedly, believes that his maleness confers on him some heteronormative advantage that the world's women lack. Sexuality then, especially in terms of promiscuity, is a recurring hang-up in Smith's work. An earlier embodiment of the writer-director, Brian O'Halloran's Dante Hicks from Clerks, blanched at the idea that his current girlfriend had been intimate with dozens of men before he entered the picture. Chasing Amy then reworks this comical overreaction, perhaps attempting to reassure Smith's now growing audience that, actually and under very specific circumstances, it doesn't matter to him if a potential life partner has slept with more people than he has. 

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.