One Bad ‘Mallrats’ Review Inspired Kevin Smith to Make ‘Chasing Amy’
Kevin Smith has always had an uneasy relationship with film critics, as evidenced by the time he created an “anti-movie review” show and his 2016 comedy Yoga Hosers, which was not so subtly about an artist who is driven mad by “negatively hurtful” critics. Thankfully, the real Kevin Smith never unleashed an army of miniature mutant Nazis onto the world because everybody hated Cop Out.
After winning widespread acclaim for his debut feature film Clerks, in 1995 Smith made Mallrats which was a tad less well received. A review in The Los Angeles Times harshly suggested that “if the Sundance Institute or the AFI ever offers a course advising directors of successful first films what to avoid the second time around, Mallrats could be at the heart of the curriculum.”
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While the movie certainly isn’t without its fans today, this probably shouldn’t have come as a huge shock to Smith. After all, we’re talking about a movie in which the Easter Bunny is viciously attacked, and a character shoves his hand up his own ass just to give someone a stinky handshake/severe bacterial infection.
But as film critic Matt Zoller Seitz recently pointed out on social media, his distaste for Mallrats was directly responsible for Smith’s next movie: Chasing Amy.
Smith revealed this tidbit in his introduction to a book containing the scripts for both Clerks and Chasing Amy (apparently nobody wanted to dig too deeply into the screenplay of Mallrats). As Smith wrote, Seitz’s review stood out from the “mountains of negative yapping about my cinematic atrocity.”
Specifically, Seitz had reflected on the fact that Clerks was, at its core, “a romantic comedy about a guy torn between two women” while Mallrats really only worked in scenes where “Smith’s fog of thin satire, physical hijinks and faux-jaded posturing dissipates.” According to Seitz, Mallrats failed because Smith didn’t allow enough space for his idealized worldview in which “cynicism is redeemed by love, and love by cynicism.” He finished the piece by floating the idea that Smith might be trying to conceal what a “sweet guy” he really is.
Smith said that he was floored by the review’s “consideration” of the film, which wasn’t just “regurgitating knee-jerk bile all over the page,” and instead served to “help me to gain insight into what exactly was happening with my work.” Smith claimed that he began writing Chasing Amy on the very same day that he read Seitz’s review, eventually regarding the movie as the “most honest and pure piece I’ve ever written.”
The degree to which Chasing Amy is a problematic film when viewed from a modern perspective is an issue the internet loves to debate, but its realism and earnestness inarguably revitalized Smith’s critical reputation in 1997. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who had panned Mallrats just two years earlier, heaped praise upon Chasing Amy, calling it “more evidence that Kevin Smith is an original and promising talent.”
While Seitz is seemingly happy to have inadvertently led to the creation of Chasing Amy, presumably no critics are leaping to claim responsibility for inspiring that Kevin Smith NFT movie.
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