Movie Review — Mallrats

Mallrats had been sitting in my Netflix queue for a year or more.  No idea why I put it in there, really — recommendations from others about Chasing Amy and Dogma, I guess, since they are both in the queue as well — but whatever.

I’ve started using the Watch Instantly feature some, watching movies 10 minutes or so at a shot when I’m sitting at the computer.  There really isn’t a lot of stuff available for watching this way: right now, I have 122 movies in my Queue, with only 23 available for this feature (including oddities like half the Star Trek films available for play but the other half not).  The real quirk has been that stuff ceases to be available from time to time; I’ve had more films go away half-watched than I’ve been able to complete.  (Which explains why Mallrats ended up at the top of my queue: when it was no longer available to watch online, I popped it to the top of the queue so I could watch the last 15 minutes.  Grr.)

(As for watching a film 10 minutes at a shot: I understand why some people feel unable to do this.  But me, I’ve been trained to do this via 30 years of comic book reading.  I am used to reading 20 pages of a story which will takes 4–10 months to complete (if ever), and waiting a month for the next piece.  And doing this with 30 different series at once.  And a novel or two.  And for several years, a daily soap opera.  So watching 10 minutes of a film each day for a couple weeks is really no problem, although I avoid doing it with more than a couple films at a time.)

Back to Mallrats…

What a waste of a movie.  Nothing redeeming in the characters, nothing illuminating in the story, and not even anything fun or funny.  (And I wanted to hit Brodie in the face several times.  A character who screams about things every time he opens his mouth and overreacts to everything may reflect some real people, but it doesn’t make for a good primary character.)

(Okay, Stan Lee’s small bit was reasonably good.)

So why am I covering the film if it’s not even worth Netflixing it?

Because of the recurring joke about the autostereogram in the film being a picture of a sailboat.  You can see the trailer here.  The stereogram appears almost full screen at 0:57.  Freeze frame and view it for yourself.



It ain’t a sailboat.  (Not that I’m the only person to ever notice that, of course.)  But that sort of a continuity flub really takes the enjoyment wind out of my s…

No, I won’t even write that.