They’re rude, independent — and raking in the cash. ANDREW WORSDALE on this week’s releases, Mallrats and Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead
AMERICAN movie-goers — the most lucrative audience in the world — are finally giving the thumbs-down to the thoughtless, cliched hype dished out by Hollywood. Instead, they’re looking to the independents to provide a different perspective — and films like Kevin Smith’s Clerks, produced on a shoe-string budget, are making millions.
Smith entered the big time with the recently released Clerks, cult-movie rag Film Threat observing: “Smith and the Clerks legend got more ink than any indie picture of the last three years, excepting Quentin Tarantino and the Pulp Fiction onslaught.” And so hip independent studio Gramercy Pictures, which financed Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused after the success of his low-budget Slacker, followed suit by funding Smith’s Mallrats — on circuit this week — to the tune of over R30-million.
Be warned: stay away if you’re tired of scatological jokes. Mallrats — like Clerks, which had Helen Suzman lambast the Mail & Guardian for recommending the movie — continually pushes the boundaries of taste. The opening monologue, for instance, concerns a character who compulsively sticks a cat up his posterior. His reasoning: “How else am I supposed to get the gerbil out?”
But those who relished the bolshy breath of dirty air that was Clerks won’t be disappointed. Mallrats is a glossy reworking of the territory, populated with similar characters — including Smith’s own Silent Bob and his whacked-out cohort, played by Jason Mewes.
The story revolves around two romantic break-ups, the jilted boyfriends hanging around a shopping mall and waxing on about life, love, Superman’s sperm (too powerful for Lois’ Lanes uterus), comic books, Star Wars, food courts, elevator sex and a grungy form of revenge called stink palming. By the end, it’s all neatly resolved by means of a tacky in- store game-show called Truth or Date — at which point you realise that, for all his coarse jokiness, Smith is a soppy romantic at heart.
Less static than its predecessor, Mallrats is still very theatrical. The characters all speak in stoned, whiny voices, tagging them as disaffected, middle- class white kids. While it’s slicker and more carefully plotted than Clerks (the big budget must have made some studio interference unavoidable), Mallrats illuminates Smith’s ongoing obsession with teenagers hanging out, alleviating their boredom with bad-taste indulgences, and finding girlfriends.
The other independent picture made by young Americans that opens this week is Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead — the first feature film from director Gary Fleder and his screenwriter pal Scott Rosenberg. Like Mallrats, it has a soft, romantic centre, but it’s dressed as a boys-with- toys gangster pic la Tarantino. (The New York Times’s Janet Maslin labelled the film “Reservoir Doggerel”.)
In it, Andy Garcia plays Jimmy the Saint, an erstwhile mob frontman now running a company that videotapes terminally ill patients’ musings on life and death for their loved ones. When paralysed gang boss Christopher Walken forces him to undertake a mission, things go predictably wrong and Jimmy and his gang face death at the hands of a weird hitman, Mr Shh, played by Steve Buscemi.
The twist, however, is that Jimmy falls in love with the luminous Dagney (Gabrielle Anwar); the director tries to pull off a gangster pic with a conscience, but he only succeeds in sentimentalising the piece. Jimmy is played as one of those noble, real men and the movie degenerates into a chauvinistic yet maudlin romance. The concluding half-hour is little more than a volley of soppy goodbyes.
The film’s flair is in the dialogue: terms like “buckwheats” (a nasty form of assassination) and “boat drinks” (the happiest of times) are explained by a Greek chorus-type narrator, played effectively enough by Jack Warden in spite of the somewhat contrived nature of the role.
The film also boasts standout performances from Treat Williams as a completely likeable psycho, and Christopher Lloyd as a sleazy gangster-turned-porno projectionist. But, for all its style, the constant harping on about mortality, romance and noble duty comes across as artificial, self-conscious and contrived.
While any deviance from the mainstream deserves applause, I far prefer Clerks’ coarse yet honest sense of romance to Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead’s arty sense of self.