shopping malls

Forbidden Fruits (2026)

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A new contender for this generation’s Heathers has emerged, and it has the strongest claim to that championship belt of any movie that I’ve seen in the two decades since Mean Girls. We love Heathers around here (it claimed the #19 spot on the Swampflix top 100), and I have a fondness for it that is, perhaps, not entirely normal (I went to NYC in 2014 to see the off-Broadway musical adaptation in its original staging at a time when I was vehement that I hated musicals). We also reference it a lot; I used it as a plot reference when writing about 2022’s Do Revenge, Brandon discussed it in conversation with spiritual successor Jawbreaker, and both he and I have nominated a couple of potential options for the crown in recent years, with me throwing my weight behind Sophia Takal’s anthologized New Year, New You and Brandon offering up (the first half of) Spontaneous as a potential candidate. It’s time for all other nominees to pack their bags and go home, though, because Forbidden Fruits is here, and I think it’s here to stay. While we’re at it, we can knock off the search for this generation’s The Craft as well, since Fruits is just as suitable for that designation, too.

Apple (Lili Reinhart) is the most powerful person in all of the Dallas Highland Mall. She’s the highest ranking of the “forbidden fruits,” a trio of gorgeous women who run free eden, an Anthropologie-esque boutique, despite the shop nominally being managed by an unseen (until the epilogue) woman named Sharon. Under Apple’s perfectly manicured thumbs are Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), a beautiful blonde airhead who dresses like Sabrina Carpenter, and Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the more “alternative” one, which means that she’s just as supermodel-hot as the other two but dresses a little more glam-goth. Dallas newcomer Pumpkin (Lola Tung) initially finds herself completely beneath their notice, but Fig takes a liking to her and convinces Heather Chandler—um, I mean Apple—to give Pumpkin a chance. The three Free Eden employees bring her on board and invite her to join them for “Paradise,” which is what they call the coven meetings that they hold in the upstairs changing area of the store. After some light hazing, Pumpkin finds herself part of the inner circle, and from there she begins to work toward the ultimate goal of dethroning Apple for something she did in their past. Unfortunately, despite the new age hippery-dippery of their beliefs and “ceremonies,” there may be some actual magic afoot, as a former member of the Free Eden crew, Pickle, seems to be suffering actual effects from a “hex” that the others placed on her for breaking Apple’s sacred rules. 

Forbidden Fruits wears its pop culture genealogy on its sleeves, just as openly and blatantly as it does its Biblical allegories. Pickle’s pre-breakdown beauty is described by calling her “Gorge-ina George.” During Pumpkin’s induction rite, each of the girls names the plant from which her fruit name grows (branch, vine, bush, etc.) and the season in which it ripens. With the addition of Pumpkin, whose fruit is harvested in autumn, they excitedly note that they now have all four seasons in their quartet, just as the witches of The Craft were delighted that the appearance of Robin Tunney’s Sarah meant that they finally had enough girls to “call the corners.” Although the Heathers influences are the strongest here, it’s not all a one-to-one comparison. Pumpkin is very much the Veronica of the narrative, but her being a member of the group with an ulterior motive to infiltrate and upend it is more like Lindsay Lohan’s Cady from Mean Girls. Apple is both Regina George and Heather Chandler, as the HBIC of the group who’s casually cruel and exerts undue influence over her underlings’ lives, but there’s no real analog to Heather Duke here, as neither of Apple’s flunkies is lying in wait to become the next queen bee should she be dethroned. Cherry is more like Amanda Seyfried’s Karen, although her ditziness is taken to such an extreme that Tara Reid’s Melody in Josie and the Pussycats is another clear, strong influence. 

That almost makes it seem like the character dynamics are more rooted in emulating Mean Girls than Heathers, but we can also pretty closely align them with the characters from The Craft: Apple is the Nancy, the biggest believer and the one with the nastiest traits buried underneath; Pumpkin is the Sarah, as previously mentioned; and Fig is the Rochelle, in that she’s fully capable of having a rich, full, fulfilling life if she just stopped hanging out with these troublemaking white girls. There’s even a little bit of a reverse Wizard of Oz happening here, as the film’s climax takes place in the mall while a tornado tears the building apart, and ironically it’s the wicked witch who survives that particular event (it’s not a spoiler if I don’t mention if anyone else was even around!). I won’t bother you with a complete recapitulation of the film’s use of Genesis-based iconography, as it’s pretty much all there on the surface: the store is Eden, Apple offers temptation, the coven’s enemies are “snakes,” etc., but the film keeps a light touch here as it does in its other homages, so it’s not distracting or heavy-handed.

All of this is to say that when I read that this was based on a play, I wasn’t surprised, as it had all of the telltale density of a story that was originally written for the stage. The play, which has the poetic and unwieldy title of Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die (a slogan which is later emblazoned on a t-shirt that one of the characters wears throughout the third act), was penned by playwright Lily Houghton, who co-wrote the screenplay for Fruits with director Meredith Alloway. Both of them appear to be quite young, and I found the breathless wittiness of it all jubilant and refreshing, even when some of the darker elements start to intrude on this bubblegum world. Cinematographer Karim Hussain is doing great work here as well; a longtime collaborator of Brandon Cronenberg (serving as either D.P. or cinematographer on all three of his features), every shot here is perfectly composed and sumptuously photographed. Some of that energy can also be attributed to editor Hanna Park, who also worked on fellow Heathers descendent Bottoms. When it comes to the cast, everyone is a delight; I’m one of the dozens of people who saw Riverdale through to its conclusion, and although I was charmed enough by Reinhard’s brief appearance in Hustlers, her performance as Betty Cooper really undersold her potential to be the sexiest, scariest woman in her domain. Shipp’s Fig is the character we all wish we could be, the sweetheart in the bitter clique, and she’s warmly inviting and fun to be around. The person having the most fun, though, is Pedretti, who’s mostly developed a reputation as a scream queen following her leading roles in both of Mike Flanagan’s Haunting shows as well as the thriller series You. She really gets to let her hair down here and get into the flow of her character’s naive vapidity, and it’s such a delight that she essentially steals the show. 

This will soon see its streaming premiere on Shudder, but I went and saw it in a theater, and I would recommend that experience over trying to watch it at home by yourself. This was a very responsive audience, the perfect strangers & companions that you want to watch a comedy with because the jokes land on different levels for different people. Failing that, invite your coven over, make up a little chant about pressed juice and cowboy boots, and have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Secret Mall Apartment (2025)

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At the turn of the millennium, Michael Townsend spent five years as a drawing instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design, but unbeknownst to his colleagues, during that time, he and seven other artists were working on something unbelievable. Inspired by a 2003 radio advertisement for the then-new Providence Place Mall in which a woman expressed her excitement about the shopping center’s opening and how it would allow her to get everything that she needed for her life in one place and expressing a desire to “live in the mall,” Townsend set about finding out if this would be possible. Over the next few years, he and several others, including fellow Providence-based artists and even a few of his students, managed to locate an unused vacant space within the mall itself and, over time, turned the 750 square foot “void” into a (mostly) habitable space, before being discovered by the mall’s powers that be and being evicted. In the nearly two decades since, the others who assisted in making the mall their home have remained unnamed—Townsend is no narc—but recently participated in the creation of Jeremy Workman’s most recent documentary, Secret Mall Apartment. 

I was intrigued by the premise, but I didn’t expect to be moved by the film. On social media recently, I saw someone calling out the documentary Waiting for Superman as being propaganda for charter schools and denouncing the way that contemporary critics had been too kind to it. This led into a discussion about documentaries that included a quotation about how a documentary that does not improve one’s knowledge about the subject more than reading an article about it is one that should be met with criticism. (With James Gunn’s upcoming Superman film, you can imagine that even with boolean additions, searching for “waiting for superman” was a futile endeavor in trying to find this discussion again.) Secret Mall Apartment is much more than that, weaving together a tale of a group of artists in opposition to gentrification, as well as a more subtle narrative about the ephemeral nature of art, that its beauty (like our lives) are meaningful not because of permanence but because of impermanence. Nowhere is this more clearly made evident than the section of the film which focuses on Townsend (and his students)’s work with in tape art, as instruction (as we see Michael teaching a class of students about using masking tape as a kind of temporary graffiti), as installation (as seen when the camera tours the Hasbro Children’s Hospital and all of the art there that was made by and in collaboration with patients), and as memorial (when Townsend and some of his students spend half a decade creating silhouettes all over Manhattan in the shape of four superimposed hearts). 

It’s the last of these that’s the most transitory, as even the website that was used to document this project is now defunct. (When this was noted during the documentary, I wondered if this was true and if the website was really gone, but even when checking the WayBack Machine’s archive, all of the pages I could find looked like this, so it does appear to be well and truly lost.) That transient nature of art is made manifest early on, when Townsend and others speak about the experience of losing Fort Thunder, an underground art collective in a Providence textile factory that hadn’t been in operation since the 1860s; for five years at the end of the last century, the place was used as a living and working space for artists and musicians. However, while the Providence Place Mall was being built—notably with no entry access on the side that faced the Olneyville district that it butted up against—developers turned their eye to that warehouse district as a place that they could further capitalize upon, and they ultimately did destroy Fort Thunder. It was this parasitic ideology, the desire to completely fill out “unused space” in every way possible, that was part of the inspiration for the Providence Place apartment artists, as they, too, were finding a way to fill an empty part of the mall which had come to dominate the city. We also get to explore an outdoor exhibit that Townsend created even earlier, a hidden public space that was only accessible by slipping through train tracks and entering a sort of covered canal, in which he had placed dozens of human figures. That exhibit, Fort Thunder, tape art, the secret apartment itself — all of these things are fleeting. The secret apartment is recreated as a set for the film, and we get to see it being explored by Townsend, his now ex-wife Adriana Valdez-Young, and others, and it serves as a stage to recreate the day that Townsend was caught and apprehended in the apartment. And then, we see it dismantled. 

And yet, in all of this, there are things that remain eternal, and which we do carry with us. Several of the other members of the secret apartment crew retain, to this day, the keys used for entry into their protest/clubhouse (the building of a cinder block wall and the installation of a door is one of the highlights of their activity). One of them was originally painted with flames, the image of which has long since been worn away on the key’s surface but remains, in some small form, in the grooves. That’s where we carry art with us, and where it stays—in the grooves. It’s a surprisingly moving piece, and I can’t wait for others to see it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Golden Eighties (1986)

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When reviewing movies for this blog, I often push myself to contextualize them within how they relate to my personal life or the current moment in pop culture at large.  I doubt many people are reading these webcasts into the abyss anyway, so I mostly treat these posts as diary entries that help me tether my moviewatching habits to a specific moment in time or personal headspace.  If I’m going to be entirely honest in these personal moviewatching diaries, I have to admit that there isn’t much room to contextualize my thoughts on Golden Eighties within a larger discourse, either personal or universal.  I watched Chantal Akerman’s shopping mall romcom musical simply because its screengrabs looked beautiful, and I loved it for that exact surface-level reason.  The film’s pastel cosmetic palette and soft neon blue lighting registered as a vision of 80s Shopping Mall Heaven in my mind, and my only frustration with it as a motion picture is that I can’t find a way to drink those colors through a funnel.  It’s not a movie I wanted to watch so much as it’s one I wanted to drown in, but I still greatly enjoyed the experience of firing it up on the Criterion Channel.

To put it as reductively as possible, Golden Eighties is a Young Girls of Rochefort for the Madonna era.  Besides restricting all its action to a single shopping mall, there isn’t anything especially challenging or avant-garde about its tangled web of unrequited loves – at least not on the level of what you’d expect from a Chantal Akerman film.  The drama mostly concerns three parallel tales of missed romantic connections: a lonely waitress who trades long-distance love letters with a beau who moved abroad, an elderly couple who reunite after having their flame extinguished by The Holocaust in their youth and, the main attraction, a she-loves-him-but-he-loves-the-other-one love triangle you’d find in just about any 1950s teen musical.  There are some political, often Feminist angles to how these relationships play out onscreen, especially in Akerman giving the equal space to an older, Jewish woman’s romantic & sexual desires (through her Jean Dieleman avatar Delphine Seyrig) among the vast cast of young, buxom Gentiles.  Mostly, though, the drama is kept intentionally light & swoony, and it all culminates in the declaration that falling in love with different suitors is like trying on pretty dresses: not all of them fit you, but it’s fun to explore.

Akerman’s arthouse background shows more in the surrealism of the cheap sound stage setting than it does in the romantic themes.  In real life, shopping malls are public, bustling spaces, but this deliberately frothy melodrama plays out in an insular, self-contained world consisting entirely of a clothing store, a hair salon, a movie theater, and a café.  It’s an odd effect, especially as those limited, rigid settings fill with a chaotic flood of singing, dancing, chattering, fashionable women.  I was fully convinced that the obligatory wedding climax was going to be staged right there in the food court, but it never came to that (unfortunately?).  I don’t know that the dreamlike artifice of the faux shopping mall was entirely intentional, since Akerman spent years scraping together funding for a larger production she never got to realize.  It really heightens the romance & melodrama at the film’s core in a way that makes it feel like a singular work of art, though, as evidenced by my desire to drown in the beauty of its screenshots.  Every frame is a gorgeous beaut, as long as you have an affection for pure-femme 1980s commercialism, as I apparently do.

Golden Eighties is imperfect, and I suspect Chantal Akerman would’ve been the first person to admit that.  Its shambling, let’s-put-on-a-show quality is just as charming as its playfully risqué pop music dance numbers, though, and my only real complaint at the end is that I wanted more songs and more costume changes.  I went in desperate to see more of its dreamlike mall-world imagery, and I left with that same insatiable hunger, which I’ll chalk up to it being a total success despite the shortcomings of its production.

-Brandon Ledet