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Mallrats (HD DVD)
Universal // R // June 26, 2007 // Region 0
List Price: $29.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
"Well...Mallrats is my favorite Kevin Smith movie."
"Aaah, you're lying. Mallrats is no one's favorite Kevin Smith film."
- Stacie Mistysyn and Kevin Smith, Jay and Silent Bob Do Degrassi
Look, I know you're about four seconds from mashing the 'page down' key a couple of times. I get it. Writing a review of Mallrats in 2007 is kinda like shitting out a few paragraphs on Attack of the Clones: you've either already seen the movie at least once or twice, there's no chance of you not picking up this HD DVD, or you just want to see how much another smarmy online critic trashes the flick. So, yeah. I'll try to keep it short.
The plot! T.S. (Jeremy London) and his comic-obsessed not-a-sidekick Brodie (Jason Lee) are both dumped by their girlfriends in the space of a few minutes. Rene (Shannen Doherty) couldn't
stomach an empty life of Sega, long boxes, and sneaking around while Brodie's mom dozes off, and when Brandi (Claire Forlani) breaks the news to T.S. that she has to put their sniffles-romantic trip to Florida on hold to fill in as a contestant on her father's game show, his overreaction is the straw, camel's back...that whole thing. So, after being unceremoniously dumped, Brodie and T.S. do what any rational, heartbroken twentysomethings would: head to the mall.
Cue the madcap zaniness. Savage Easter bunny beatings. Extended musings about superheroes screwing. Rants about improperly supervised kids getting shredded on escalators. A jailbait prodigy methodically documenting her sexual escapades. A glimpse into the future guided by a, um, fascinatingly nippled topless psychic. The hidden mysteries of a Magic Eye poster. Jay and Silent Bob mark deux. Elaborate schemes to trash Brandi's father's half-assed knock-off of The Dating Game. Two and two, right back at you.
Okay, even with the full disclosure that I'm a yellow belt Kevin Smith fanboy, Mallrats really isn't much of a movie. The skeleton of the plot is generic, only a couple characters have any real personality beyond the bare minimum the story needs to creak along, and its pop-culture-peppered, retail day-in-the-life plays it kinda safe as a follow-up to Clerks. Some stretches are overwritten and underdirected, saddling actors with dialogue that I'm sure looked great on paper but sounds stilted and awkward when actually delivered, and the hit to miss ratio of the gags and pop culture references isn't in the same league as Clerks either.
Even if Mallrats doesn't entirely gel as a movie, there are fist-sized chunks of dialogue as witty and ridiculously quotable as anything else Kevin Smith has penned. Mallrats is more of a collection of loosely-connected scenes than a tightly scripted film anyway, and even if a bunch of 'em sputter and stutter along the way, there are enough individually great sequences to prop up the rest. Jason Lee took his first real turn in front of the camera for Mallrats, and it's a breakout performance, as the kids say: vulgar and hysterical with a cock-sure swagger, overshadowing everyone and everything else in the flick.
Mallrats is the weakest of Kevin Smith's films -- and I say this not having seen View Askew's current punching bag, Jersey Girl -- but even if it's not exactly good, it's good enough; fans of Smith's should see in Mallrats enough of what they dig about his movies to find it worth a few spins.
Video: This 1.85:1 high-def
presentation of Mallrats has been culled from the same master as the 2005 DVD re-release, but it's a marked improvement in just about every conceivable way. The bright pastels of the Eden Prairie Mall are more vivid, and the image overall is considerably crisper and more detailed. This is particularly noticeable whenever the camera closes in, and the sunny opening with T.S. and Brandi that sets the stage for the rest of the flick really stands out. The compression hiccups from the DVD are all wiped away with this VC-1 encode. The shots of the blueprint as Jay runs through how Silent Bob is going to take down La Fours with a sockful of quarters always looked kinda blocky and unstable on DVD, f'r instance, but there's nothing like that on this high-def release.
Admittedly, Mallrats doesn't have the glossy sparkle of an $80 million flick -- wider shots in the mall are a bit on the soft side, and the film stock is fairly grainy -- but that's not exactly unexpected. The film elements are in good shape too, with wear limited to a handful of small specks. The only real problem is a mildly oversharpened appearance that occasionally results in some haloing around edges. It's noticeable but didn't strike me as overly intrusive, and the edge enhancement seems dialed down from the previous DVD.
Not perfect, no, but this HD DVD of Mallrats is a definite step up from the DVD, and it's one of the better looking releases from Universal's last couple waves of catalog titles.
Audio: The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio is reasonably well-done too. The sound design divvies up most of the action across the front speakers and establishes a strong sense of directionality. The surrounds are used more sparsely, but there are some nice discrete effects as the dating show set is being put together -- the whir of electric drills and the clatter of stuff tumbling over during a 'sound test' -- along with light ambiance in a few spots like the noisy food court. The mix is full bodied, too, adding a meaty thud to punches and kicks as well as beefing up the chugging guitars in the soundtrack. Some of the more loudly shouted dialogue is clipped, but that's not a constant hassle. Nothing earth-shattering but decent enough.
Both a stereo dub and subtitles in French have also been included, although the Spanish 2.0 track and subtitle stream from the DVD didn't make the cut on the next-gen release.
Extras: Universal is one of
just a few studios supporting these next-gen formats to make it a point to include all of the extras from earlier DVD editions, but don't toss your stack of Mallrats DVDs in the trash quite yet: there are a couple of pretty massive omissions this time around.
This HD DVD of Mallrats is modeled after the 10th anniversary DVD. That disc didn't include the commentary picture-in-picture video from Universal's initial DVD release, and the footage didn't make its way to this HD DVD either. Kinda odd, considering that picture-in-picture commentaries are such a staple of Universal's day-and-date releases. Only the theatrical cut of Mallrats is included on this HD DVD too, throwing out the extended edition from the 10th anniversary release. As lousy as the extended edition is, that's...kind of a big thing to a lose, an entire cut of the flick and all. I couldn't find any of the oodles of Easter eggs from the DVDs or the production photographs on this release either. If Universal doesn't want to futz around with two-disc HD DVD editions or anything at this stage in the game, that's completely understandable, but I really would've just as soon have had the studio hold off on a high-def release until they could do it right.
Everything else from the 10th anniversary DVD is on here, though, presented in standard definition and either full-frame or letterboxed. Most of 'em were produced in those dark days before anamorphic widescreen extras, so that's understandable.
There are around nine minutes' worth of interviews shot back in '95 while filming was still underway. Most of the key cast members get some face time, gabbing about how great everyone and everything is, what it's like to work with a young, driven director like Kevin Smith, the improvisational atmosphere on the set, and a few quick notes about each of their characters.
Kevin Smith also chimes in with a hysterically deadpan 9 minute Q&A, quipping about Mallrats' mighty legacy, his shut-in fanbase, and the sirens' song of DVD extras. This leads into a fifty minute Q&A shot after a tenth anniversary screening, featuring Smith, director of photography David Klein, producers Jim Jacks and Scott Mosier, and actors Renee Humphrey, Ethan Suplee, Jason Mewes, Jeremy London, and Jason Lee. Snarky and self-deprecating, the nine of 'em field questions about whether or not Mallrats inspired a rash of Easter bunny-themed violence, how Stan Lee was cast up in the flick, what would've wound up in a Mallrats sequel, Jason Lee kinda/sorta making the transition from skating to acting, where Mallrats falls in the Smith ouevre, and the cast's reaction to the movie's anemic box office. The best stuff comes when they veer off on tangents: Smith and Mosier speaking to a film class at Boston College the Monday after slipping on Mallrats' opening weekend flopsweat, Mewes pointing out during screenings which extras he nailed, slathering Jim Jacks' home phone with chicken grease, and chatting up an overenthusiastic French chick in the audience. Great stuff.
The audio commentary's one of View Askew's best too, cramming Smith, Lee, Mewes, and Mosier into the recording booth with Ben Affleck and View Askew historian-slash-movie message board mainstay Vincent Pereira. The commentary has kind of a self-deprecatory bent to it too, marveling in awe whenever the camera moves and poking fun at some of the lousier movies they've made, Smith's gut, and some of the particularly nasty reviews the movie snagged. Lotsa casting notes, including another Party of Five alum trying out for Trish the Dish, William Atherton from Ghostbusters passing because he didn't want to act in such a 'childish movie' yet turned around and made Biodome, and giving some of the actors who didn't make the cut a little screentime by morphing them into a quasi-nightmarish amalgam on Brodie's shirt. The bits that didn't make the movie come up a lot -- all the dialogue that had to be looped after gutting most of the first act, Universal balking at a cum-in-the-hair joke right before the enormous success of There's Something About Mary, yanking out Svenning's rambling backstory, two scoops of homoerotic subtext -- along with stuff like the Affleck-less poster, a plug in Spike, Mike, Slackers, &
Dykes that Smith had changed before it went to press, a botched cross-promotion with Sega... Another in a long line of fantastic View Askew commentaries and more fun than the movie itself.
Even though the HD DVD doesn't include the extended version of Mallrats, that footage and more is provided in an hour long deleted scenes reel, although it's culled from a letterboxed rough cut rather than the polished, anamorphic widescreen version from the 10th anniversary DVD. There's a peek at the first few pages of the unfilmed introduction from the original screenplay, the full twenty-someodd minute setup with an accidental assassination attempt that was completely trimmed out of the final cut, and longer versions of scenes that did make it into the movie, this time presented with the original dialogue referring to that gutted subplot in place. Lots of longer and alternate takes on scenes too, including a transvestitetastic sex tape, another Trish fling, more stinkpalm, more of Truth or Date, more of the Brodie-'n-Rene breakup, more of the Brodie beatdown, and more Animal House-ish "where are they now?" bits. Kevin Smith and Vincent Pereira serve up brief introductions for each chunk of footage.
A set of interviews from 1998 catches up with Kevin Smith, Scott Mosier, Ben Affleck, Jason Mewes, Jason Lee, Walt Flanagan, and Bryan Johnson. Running about 21 minutes in total, they note how this "Smart Porky's" comedy came together, struggling with profanity even in a flick with a studio mandate for teenaged titties, trying to convince Universal to give them less money for the budget, the studio wanting just about anyone but Jason Mewes to step in as Jay, and the leisurely, friendly tone Kevin Smith established on the set. They also talk about the aftermath of the movie, from its bungled marketing to its not-so-positive critical response, as well as their gradual realization that Mallrats was a box office bomb.
"The Erection of an Epic" (22 min.) takes a completely different approach from most making-of pieces, starting off not with some story about the germ of an idea or someone handing off a screenplay, but by Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan reading from his decidedly negative review of Mallrats. It's a fairly critical featurette in general, with several of the participants discussing how Mallrats
doesn't follow the usual studio movie logic; it's an R-rated movie geared towards kids who weren't old enough to actually see it, leaving an audience of "emotionally stunted white boys who love comic books" as one of 'em puts it. The critics featured in "The Erection of an Epic" -- Kenneth Turan and New York Times film critic Janet Maslin -- stand by their opinions but aren't blinded by their dislike of the film, with Maslin acknowledging how time has caught up with Mallrats and how what was so finger-wigglingly-outrageous back in '95 now seems kind of tame even by network TV standards.
The list of interviewees in "The Erection of an Epic" is enormous: comic book guru Paul Dini, actors Ben Affleck, Jason Lee, Ethan Suplee, Jeremy London, Jason Mewes, Renee Humphrey, Stan Lee, and Michael Rooker, writer/director/co-star Kevin Smith, casting director Don Phillips, director of photography David Klein, and producers Scott Mosier, Sean Daniel, Jim Jacks, and Cotty Chubb. They speak at length about the scale of the production compared to Clerks, the process of assembling a cast, the camaraderie on the set, how the commercial and critical failure of the movie led directly to Chasing Amy, and how the film finally found its audience on video and cable after its disastrous theatrical release. These sorts of making-of pieces tend to be kind of self-congratulatory and lightweight, but "The Erection of an Epic" feels a lot more sincere than most, and there's something about the way the cast and crew feel so strongly about the movie without overlooking its rougher edges that makes it incredibly endearing.
The eight minute outtake reel has a lot of the usual stuff. Y'know, the cast cracking up, screwing around with props, and, uh, prison rape. Kevin Smith's spoof on shameless soundtrack music videos -- backed by a fuzz-pop cover by The Goops of "Build Me Up, Buttercup" -- is also included, and a rough looking full-frame trailer rounds out the extras.
Conclusion: Mallrats is my least favorite of Kevin Smith's Askewniverse flicks, but even if it doesn't entirely gel as a movie, there are enough scattered scenes I love for me not to feel all that guilty recommending this HD DVD. The high-def spit-'n-polish is a big step up from the tenth anniversary DVD, and there are enough extras piled on to keep most viewers busy for a couple of days if they haven't dug through 'em already. The uninitiated would be better off digging through Kevin Smith's other movies first, but for the View Askew faithful...? Recommended.
Related Reviews: If you're still looking for something to click on, DVD Talk also has reviews of two other Kevin Smith flicks in high-def: the HD DVD of Clerks 2 as well as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back on Blu-ray. There are also a few DVD reviews of Mallrats if you're keeping an eye out for a second (or third...or fourth) opinion.
"Aaah, you're lying. Mallrats is no one's favorite Kevin Smith film."
- Stacie Mistysyn and Kevin Smith, Jay and Silent Bob Do Degrassi
Look, I know you're about four seconds from mashing the 'page down' key a couple of times. I get it. Writing a review of Mallrats in 2007 is kinda like shitting out a few paragraphs on Attack of the Clones: you've either already seen the movie at least once or twice, there's no chance of you not picking up this HD DVD, or you just want to see how much another smarmy online critic trashes the flick. So, yeah. I'll try to keep it short.
The plot! T.S. (Jeremy London) and his comic-obsessed not-a-sidekick Brodie (Jason Lee) are both dumped by their girlfriends in the space of a few minutes. Rene (Shannen Doherty) couldn't
stomach an empty life of Sega, long boxes, and sneaking around while Brodie's mom dozes off, and when Brandi (Claire Forlani) breaks the news to T.S. that she has to put their sniffles-romantic trip to Florida on hold to fill in as a contestant on her father's game show, his overreaction is the straw, camel's back...that whole thing. So, after being unceremoniously dumped, Brodie and T.S. do what any rational, heartbroken twentysomethings would: head to the mall. Cue the madcap zaniness. Savage Easter bunny beatings. Extended musings about superheroes screwing. Rants about improperly supervised kids getting shredded on escalators. A jailbait prodigy methodically documenting her sexual escapades. A glimpse into the future guided by a, um, fascinatingly nippled topless psychic. The hidden mysteries of a Magic Eye poster. Jay and Silent Bob mark deux. Elaborate schemes to trash Brandi's father's half-assed knock-off of The Dating Game. Two and two, right back at you.
Okay, even with the full disclosure that I'm a yellow belt Kevin Smith fanboy, Mallrats really isn't much of a movie. The skeleton of the plot is generic, only a couple characters have any real personality beyond the bare minimum the story needs to creak along, and its pop-culture-peppered, retail day-in-the-life plays it kinda safe as a follow-up to Clerks. Some stretches are overwritten and underdirected, saddling actors with dialogue that I'm sure looked great on paper but sounds stilted and awkward when actually delivered, and the hit to miss ratio of the gags and pop culture references isn't in the same league as Clerks either.
Even if Mallrats doesn't entirely gel as a movie, there are fist-sized chunks of dialogue as witty and ridiculously quotable as anything else Kevin Smith has penned. Mallrats is more of a collection of loosely-connected scenes than a tightly scripted film anyway, and even if a bunch of 'em sputter and stutter along the way, there are enough individually great sequences to prop up the rest. Jason Lee took his first real turn in front of the camera for Mallrats, and it's a breakout performance, as the kids say: vulgar and hysterical with a cock-sure swagger, overshadowing everyone and everything else in the flick.
Mallrats is the weakest of Kevin Smith's films -- and I say this not having seen View Askew's current punching bag, Jersey Girl -- but even if it's not exactly good, it's good enough; fans of Smith's should see in Mallrats enough of what they dig about his movies to find it worth a few spins.
Video: This 1.85:1 high-def
presentation of Mallrats has been culled from the same master as the 2005 DVD re-release, but it's a marked improvement in just about every conceivable way. The bright pastels of the Eden Prairie Mall are more vivid, and the image overall is considerably crisper and more detailed. This is particularly noticeable whenever the camera closes in, and the sunny opening with T.S. and Brandi that sets the stage for the rest of the flick really stands out. The compression hiccups from the DVD are all wiped away with this VC-1 encode. The shots of the blueprint as Jay runs through how Silent Bob is going to take down La Fours with a sockful of quarters always looked kinda blocky and unstable on DVD, f'r instance, but there's nothing like that on this high-def release. Admittedly, Mallrats doesn't have the glossy sparkle of an $80 million flick -- wider shots in the mall are a bit on the soft side, and the film stock is fairly grainy -- but that's not exactly unexpected. The film elements are in good shape too, with wear limited to a handful of small specks. The only real problem is a mildly oversharpened appearance that occasionally results in some haloing around edges. It's noticeable but didn't strike me as overly intrusive, and the edge enhancement seems dialed down from the previous DVD.
Not perfect, no, but this HD DVD of Mallrats is a definite step up from the DVD, and it's one of the better looking releases from Universal's last couple waves of catalog titles.
Audio: The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio is reasonably well-done too. The sound design divvies up most of the action across the front speakers and establishes a strong sense of directionality. The surrounds are used more sparsely, but there are some nice discrete effects as the dating show set is being put together -- the whir of electric drills and the clatter of stuff tumbling over during a 'sound test' -- along with light ambiance in a few spots like the noisy food court. The mix is full bodied, too, adding a meaty thud to punches and kicks as well as beefing up the chugging guitars in the soundtrack. Some of the more loudly shouted dialogue is clipped, but that's not a constant hassle. Nothing earth-shattering but decent enough.
Both a stereo dub and subtitles in French have also been included, although the Spanish 2.0 track and subtitle stream from the DVD didn't make the cut on the next-gen release.
Extras: Universal is one of
just a few studios supporting these next-gen formats to make it a point to include all of the extras from earlier DVD editions, but don't toss your stack of Mallrats DVDs in the trash quite yet: there are a couple of pretty massive omissions this time around. This HD DVD of Mallrats is modeled after the 10th anniversary DVD. That disc didn't include the commentary picture-in-picture video from Universal's initial DVD release, and the footage didn't make its way to this HD DVD either. Kinda odd, considering that picture-in-picture commentaries are such a staple of Universal's day-and-date releases. Only the theatrical cut of Mallrats is included on this HD DVD too, throwing out the extended edition from the 10th anniversary release. As lousy as the extended edition is, that's...kind of a big thing to a lose, an entire cut of the flick and all. I couldn't find any of the oodles of Easter eggs from the DVDs or the production photographs on this release either. If Universal doesn't want to futz around with two-disc HD DVD editions or anything at this stage in the game, that's completely understandable, but I really would've just as soon have had the studio hold off on a high-def release until they could do it right.
Everything else from the 10th anniversary DVD is on here, though, presented in standard definition and either full-frame or letterboxed. Most of 'em were produced in those dark days before anamorphic widescreen extras, so that's understandable.
There are around nine minutes' worth of interviews shot back in '95 while filming was still underway. Most of the key cast members get some face time, gabbing about how great everyone and everything is, what it's like to work with a young, driven director like Kevin Smith, the improvisational atmosphere on the set, and a few quick notes about each of their characters.
Kevin Smith also chimes in with a hysterically deadpan 9 minute Q&A, quipping about Mallrats' mighty legacy, his shut-in fanbase, and the sirens' song of DVD extras. This leads into a fifty minute Q&A shot after a tenth anniversary screening, featuring Smith, director of photography David Klein, producers Jim Jacks and Scott Mosier, and actors Renee Humphrey, Ethan Suplee, Jason Mewes, Jeremy London, and Jason Lee. Snarky and self-deprecating, the nine of 'em field questions about whether or not Mallrats inspired a rash of Easter bunny-themed violence, how Stan Lee was cast up in the flick, what would've wound up in a Mallrats sequel, Jason Lee kinda/sorta making the transition from skating to acting, where Mallrats falls in the Smith ouevre, and the cast's reaction to the movie's anemic box office. The best stuff comes when they veer off on tangents: Smith and Mosier speaking to a film class at Boston College the Monday after slipping on Mallrats' opening weekend flopsweat, Mewes pointing out during screenings which extras he nailed, slathering Jim Jacks' home phone with chicken grease, and chatting up an overenthusiastic French chick in the audience. Great stuff.
The audio commentary's one of View Askew's best too, cramming Smith, Lee, Mewes, and Mosier into the recording booth with Ben Affleck and View Askew historian-slash-movie message board mainstay Vincent Pereira. The commentary has kind of a self-deprecatory bent to it too, marveling in awe whenever the camera moves and poking fun at some of the lousier movies they've made, Smith's gut, and some of the particularly nasty reviews the movie snagged. Lotsa casting notes, including another Party of Five alum trying out for Trish the Dish, William Atherton from Ghostbusters passing because he didn't want to act in such a 'childish movie' yet turned around and made Biodome, and giving some of the actors who didn't make the cut a little screentime by morphing them into a quasi-nightmarish amalgam on Brodie's shirt. The bits that didn't make the movie come up a lot -- all the dialogue that had to be looped after gutting most of the first act, Universal balking at a cum-in-the-hair joke right before the enormous success of There's Something About Mary, yanking out Svenning's rambling backstory, two scoops of homoerotic subtext -- along with stuff like the Affleck-less poster, a plug in Spike, Mike, Slackers, &
Dykes that Smith had changed before it went to press, a botched cross-promotion with Sega... Another in a long line of fantastic View Askew commentaries and more fun than the movie itself. Even though the HD DVD doesn't include the extended version of Mallrats, that footage and more is provided in an hour long deleted scenes reel, although it's culled from a letterboxed rough cut rather than the polished, anamorphic widescreen version from the 10th anniversary DVD. There's a peek at the first few pages of the unfilmed introduction from the original screenplay, the full twenty-someodd minute setup with an accidental assassination attempt that was completely trimmed out of the final cut, and longer versions of scenes that did make it into the movie, this time presented with the original dialogue referring to that gutted subplot in place. Lots of longer and alternate takes on scenes too, including a transvestitetastic sex tape, another Trish fling, more stinkpalm, more of Truth or Date, more of the Brodie-'n-Rene breakup, more of the Brodie beatdown, and more Animal House-ish "where are they now?" bits. Kevin Smith and Vincent Pereira serve up brief introductions for each chunk of footage.
A set of interviews from 1998 catches up with Kevin Smith, Scott Mosier, Ben Affleck, Jason Mewes, Jason Lee, Walt Flanagan, and Bryan Johnson. Running about 21 minutes in total, they note how this "Smart Porky's" comedy came together, struggling with profanity even in a flick with a studio mandate for teenaged titties, trying to convince Universal to give them less money for the budget, the studio wanting just about anyone but Jason Mewes to step in as Jay, and the leisurely, friendly tone Kevin Smith established on the set. They also talk about the aftermath of the movie, from its bungled marketing to its not-so-positive critical response, as well as their gradual realization that Mallrats was a box office bomb.
"The Erection of an Epic" (22 min.) takes a completely different approach from most making-of pieces, starting off not with some story about the germ of an idea or someone handing off a screenplay, but by Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan reading from his decidedly negative review of Mallrats. It's a fairly critical featurette in general, with several of the participants discussing how Mallrats
doesn't follow the usual studio movie logic; it's an R-rated movie geared towards kids who weren't old enough to actually see it, leaving an audience of "emotionally stunted white boys who love comic books" as one of 'em puts it. The critics featured in "The Erection of an Epic" -- Kenneth Turan and New York Times film critic Janet Maslin -- stand by their opinions but aren't blinded by their dislike of the film, with Maslin acknowledging how time has caught up with Mallrats and how what was so finger-wigglingly-outrageous back in '95 now seems kind of tame even by network TV standards. The list of interviewees in "The Erection of an Epic" is enormous: comic book guru Paul Dini, actors Ben Affleck, Jason Lee, Ethan Suplee, Jeremy London, Jason Mewes, Renee Humphrey, Stan Lee, and Michael Rooker, writer/director/co-star Kevin Smith, casting director Don Phillips, director of photography David Klein, and producers Scott Mosier, Sean Daniel, Jim Jacks, and Cotty Chubb. They speak at length about the scale of the production compared to Clerks, the process of assembling a cast, the camaraderie on the set, how the commercial and critical failure of the movie led directly to Chasing Amy, and how the film finally found its audience on video and cable after its disastrous theatrical release. These sorts of making-of pieces tend to be kind of self-congratulatory and lightweight, but "The Erection of an Epic" feels a lot more sincere than most, and there's something about the way the cast and crew feel so strongly about the movie without overlooking its rougher edges that makes it incredibly endearing.
The eight minute outtake reel has a lot of the usual stuff. Y'know, the cast cracking up, screwing around with props, and, uh, prison rape. Kevin Smith's spoof on shameless soundtrack music videos -- backed by a fuzz-pop cover by The Goops of "Build Me Up, Buttercup" -- is also included, and a rough looking full-frame trailer rounds out the extras.
Conclusion: Mallrats is my least favorite of Kevin Smith's Askewniverse flicks, but even if it doesn't entirely gel as a movie, there are enough scattered scenes I love for me not to feel all that guilty recommending this HD DVD. The high-def spit-'n-polish is a big step up from the tenth anniversary DVD, and there are enough extras piled on to keep most viewers busy for a couple of days if they haven't dug through 'em already. The uninitiated would be better off digging through Kevin Smith's other movies first, but for the View Askew faithful...? Recommended.
Related Reviews: If you're still looking for something to click on, DVD Talk also has reviews of two other Kevin Smith flicks in high-def: the HD DVD of Clerks 2 as well as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back on Blu-ray. There are also a few DVD reviews of Mallrats if you're keeping an eye out for a second (or third...or fourth) opinion.
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