Mitch's Blog

A look back at “Mallrats” on its 30th anniversary, including a big interview with Kevin Smith. By Katie Baker at The Ringer

“Mallrats” was Smith’s second movie, coming off “Clerks,” a low-budget indy which saw him hailed as a cinematic genius. “Mallrats” was a spectacular flop, and critics were now saying Smith was an idiot.

But “Mallrats” has lived on as a cult classic and fan favorite, and making the movie shaped both Smith’s career and his life. He met his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach-Smith, through a circuitous route as a result of making “Mallrats,” so (as he points out) their daughter owes her life to “Mallrats.”

Smith tells a story about how he had to flee his house during the recent Los Angeles wildfires:

Smith considers himself “a pack rat and a fuckin’ hoarder,” but on that day, he was holding only two things when he left the house with his wife and their dogs. The first was a small urn containing a portion of his father’s ashes.

“The other,” Smith says, “was my Silent Bob costume. Because I was like, Well, if everything burns down, I’m gonna have to work and shit.”

I wouldn’t say “Mallrats” is one of my favorite movies, but I have seen it two or three times and enjoyed it and — you know what? There aren’t many movies I’ve seen more than once so yeah I guess “Mallrats” is one of my favorite movies. I know the movie is loved by middle-schoolers, but if you’re reading this you’ve seen my posts and you know that a big piece of my sense of humor is stuck at age 13.

China has brought millions out of poverty. The US has not – by choice

Jamelle Bouie: The White House Gold Rush Is On. “If Trump’s first term was marked by a level of graft and self-dealing that would have embarrassed a Tammany stalwart, then his second term seems to be an explicit effort to outpace his previous record and set a new high-water mark for political corruption in the United States…. By any and every measure, in other words, Trump is the most corrupt person to ever sit in the Oval Office.”

America is becoming Dallas. Hamilton Nolan visits a megachurch. “Could we not have the love without the accompanying hate? The community, without the accompanying need to make our community an army ready to destroy all others?

“Kumbaya” is a pretty bad folk song but it does not deserve the abuse it’s taken.

We’re going to war with Venezuela for the same reasons we went to war with Iraq. Oil, the president is legit a bad man, and handwaving about terrorism. We risk the same outcome.

A main argument of Trump’s 2015 Presidential campaign, which helped get him elected, that the Iraq war was a stupid, bipartisan blunder. And he was right! It left us with a mess that we didn’t clean up for nearly 20 years. We’re still paying hundreds of billions of dollars per year for that fiasco. And yet Trump, the stupidest and most incompetent man who ever occupied the White House, says, “That was great! Let’s do it again!”

An ancient Roman epitaph for a dog.

I continued reading “Lord of the Rings” last night. Frodo and his hobbit scooby-gang have left Bree. We’re getting a lot more description of landscape and also talk of the Black Riders. That name did not age well. Strider recited an interminably long poem about an elf woman and human man who fell in love. She was immortal and she died. I think. I didn’t follow what I was reading too well; I was falling asleep by then. I started thinking that Carl Hiaasen had a new book out a few months ago and I would really like to read that. Then I decided to call it a night on LoTR and read something else, but I was too tired for that so we just watched a little TV and went to bed.

Karoline Leavitt says Trump calling a woman reporter “piggy” is an example of him being “respectful” and journalists should appreciate that.

I’m sure that she and her boss, the sexual predator, pedophile and convicted criminal Donald J. Trump, will find it respectful when I say that they’re despicable idiots and that they will appreciate it.

I recently resolved to stop keeping empty boxes and to throw out the empty boxes that I already have.

But today I received shoes from Zappos — a box inside a box — and those boxes are too good to throw out. Sturdy, clean, regular and the perfect size for … something. I’ll figure it out.