Mallrats (1995)

Kevin Smith followed Clerks with actual Miramax money, a whole mall, and Stan Lee, and thirty years later the result still splits every room it enters. Mallrats (1995) is Steve's pick, and he is not casual about it. He grabbed the VHS off a Blockbuster shelf around '96 purely because the cover art looked like a Star Wars poster, went straight from there into the rest of Smith's filmography, and dressed as Silent Bob for two different Halloweens in college, beard and wig and coat, pantomiming smoking weed and falling asleep if anyone asked him where Jay was.

Nic had never seen it. He's on record as not a Smith guy, and about halfway through the movie his wife Jeanie grabbed his leg and told him that for his own health he wasn't allowed to watch any more Kevin Smith films for a while. He says he spent the runtime feeling like Ethan Suplee in front of the Magic Eye poster, standing there unable to see what everyone else claimed was right in front of him. Fair warning: this ends up being the widest the two of them have ever landed apart, and it isn't close.

Which somehow doesn't stop it from being a great hang. They agree Shannen Doherty handles Smith's dialogue better than anybody else in the cast. Nic clocks Ben Affleck's enormous suit as the look of a Talking Heads cover band frontman. Steve has the entire DVD commentary loaded and ready, including the story of a network cropping a Coca-Cola cup out of a scene over a Pepsi deal, and the delicious fact that William Atherton passed on this as beneath him and then went and made Bio-Dome. There's a tangent about Magic Eye books as the official Christmas gift of relatives who don't really love you, a full defense of the stinkpalm as a small price to pay for the smiting of one's enemies, and genuine admiration for Brodie's ruling that the cookie stand is an autonomous unit for mid-mall snacking.

Steve says Kevin Smith makes movies you either love or hate, with almost nobody stuck in the middle. Exhibit A was sitting right across the table.